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TO 

MY MOTHER 





THE 

MOTHER’S INFLUENCE 

ON 

PHILLIPS BROOKS 

WITH A 

SHORT SKETCH 

OF 

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

^ E ' L. Macmahon 


** Btj tljrir fruits you stjall knurn tl?fm ” 


COPLEY SQUARE POST OFFICE 
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 


/ <))!» 



Copyright, 1916, by 

E. L. MACMAHON 

All right* reserved 






the COMMERCIAL PRESS, RANDOLPH. MASS- 





I 



CONTENTS 


Chapter 


Page* 

I. 

Family Life. Boyhood. College. 

1-19 

II. 

Alexandria. Prayer. “The Question of Ques- 
tions.” Philadelphia. The Civil War. 

20-35 

III. 

The Child’s Priceless Friendship and Experiences. 

36-47 

IV. 

Frederick and Arthur Prooks. The Boston Fire. 
The Old and the New Trinity Church. 

48-52 

V. 

The British Church. The Holy Catholic Church. 
Great Churchmen. ..... 

53-66 

VI. 

The Orator. The Point of Contact or Apperception. 

66-72 

VII. 

The Making of Character. Miracles. The Mother’s 
Judgment. . . 

73-78 

VIII. 

The Death of Father and Mother. The Ringing 
of the Rectory Bell. ..... 

79-86 

IX. 

The Decision of the People. The Bishop. “Forever 
with the Lord.” “Who Is Lord but Christ.” 

87-101 


NOTE — For the source of the materials I gratefully acknowl- 
edge my indebtedness to: My mother; my own experience; “The Life 
and Letters of Phillips Brooks,” vols. I, II, by Rev. Alexander V. G. 
Allen, E. P. Dutton & Co., 1900; the sermons and addresses by 
Phillips Brooks published by E. P. Dutton & Co. ; to various other 
publications, and to the “Boston Evening Transcript” and “The Bos- 
ton Herald.” 

E. L. MACMAHON. 







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The Mothers Influence on 
Phillips Brooks 

BY 

E. L. MACMAHON 


Chapter I 

FAMILY LIFE • BOYHOOD • COLLEGE 

A BOUT five minutes* walk from the historic Common 
in Boston, and before the Public Garden was dream- 
ed of, there lived a boy named Phillips Brooks in the house, 
56 High Street, wherein he was bom on December 1 3, 
1835, and when he was four years old a dreadful thing 
happened to him — his teacher told him he must write a 
composition. He went home crying, but with slight aid and 
much loving encouragement he wrote his composition on 
“ The Elephant.” Sometime before this crisis in the boy’s 
life his elder brother, aged five, conceived the brilliant idea 
of hiring a horse and buggy and giving Philly a ride down 
hill in North Andover, where the family spent many sum- 
mers, and upon the refusal of the father and mother to con- 
sent to this adventure the howls of the boys became as 
loud as two strong pairs of lungs could make them. 

After a while there were more brothers and the six boys 
had the most beautiful times, especially in summer, some- 
times in their uncle’s home but generally at North Andover 
1 


in the old homestead. Of course they tried riding down 
hill in an empty wagon, and on one occasion they crashed 
into a fence, breaking the shaft and other parts of the light 
wagon. Another time they put up the blinds to the village 
store windows, shutting themselves in while the master was 
away, and explored its contents. For this prank they car- 
ried home to their mother in Boston a serious document 
from their aunt complaining of their mischievous behaviour. 
When Philly was seven he wrote a mighty good letter to 
his mother about some pears, to which he signed himself 
“Your affect Friend, Phillips Brooks.” 

One evening in 3 Rowe Street, to which the family had 
moved in 1843, and where Frederick, Arthur and John 
were born, William, Phillips and George were sitting around 
the table with their slates and pencils and books, and Phillips 
was amusing himself by trying to see how far down his 
throat he could put a new, freshly sharpened pencil with- 
out swallowing it, when suddenly it went down and then 
he asked his mother what would happen to any one who 
swallowed a slate pencil whole. She said, “ I suppose it 
would kill him.” He said nothing more but waited for the 
slate pencil to begin its deadly work. 

When Phillips was eight years old he was transferred 
to the Public Grammar on Mason Street. When school 
was out instead of going with the other boys to play on 
the Common he went straight home. He was never active 
in the games of his school-fellows, probably because he 
was growing so fast that he had no strength left after school 
to play rough games and for tom-fooling, for when he was 
fourteen he was five feet eleven inches tall and weighed 
1 33 pounds. He entered the Boston Latin School at the 
age of eleven and stayed five years ; while there he took 
a vow: “I, Phillips Brooks, do hereby promise and pledge 
myself to study, henceforward, to the best of my ability. 
P. Brooks.” 


2 


Upon moving to Boston in 1 833 the Brookses went at 
first to Dr. Frothingham’s church because he had married 
a cousin, and both Will and Phil were baptized by him in 
the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Floly 
Ghost. In 1833, however, the schism between Trinitarians 
and Unitarians had become complete and definite, and Dr. 
Frothingham, preaching on the subject, said that there was 
nothing in the Bible to warrant the belief in the doctrine 
of the Trinity, nor in the Atonement by Christ. This con- 
firmed what Mrs. Brooks already knew, that she and her 
minister were at odds on religion, the one vital element in 
the training and the education of her children. Religion to 
Mrs. Brooks was a personal love for a Personal God, and 
she believed that “ the free gift of God is eternal life in 
Christ Jesus our Lord ” (Romans 7:13). The gift is IN 
CHRIST, not through Christ, for she believed that Christ 
is not only the Messenger but the message, and that eter- 
nal life cannot be received apart from Christ, and that the 
Gospel is the revelation of the possibility of reconciliation 
with God through relationship to Christ. In her dilemma 
she turned to the Episcopal Church, and had many con- 
ferences with its leaders in Boston and especially with the 
rector of St. Paul’s Church onTremont Street, opposite the 
Common. Dr. Stone was a strong and. eloquent preacher 
who deeply moved the hearts of his congregation and 
by his winning personality daily confirmed the impression 
he made in the pulpit. He explained the faith and forms 
of the Episcopal Church to Mrs. Brooks and went over the 
Book of Common Prayer, explaining in detail its origin, 
history and meaning. The baptism of William and Phillips 
was discussed as they had been baptized by Dr. Froth- 
ingham, but Dr. Stone decided that re-baptism was un- 
necessary because the two boys had been baptized in the 
Name of the Trinity. In 1 839 Mrs. Brooks and her sister, 
Miss Susan Phillips, were admitted into the Episcopal 


Church, Philly being then only three years old, for he would 
not be four till the middle of December, therefore, from 
the earliest recollections of Phillips Brooks St. Paul’s was 
his church-home. His father wrote a year later that 
although he found the Morning Service of the Episcopal 
Church rather long the Afternoon Service just suited him, 
and nothing would induce him to return to Dr. Frothing- 
ham. In 1 840 Mrs. Brooks was confirmed and later her 
sister was also admitted into the full privileges of the 
Episcopal Church by confirmation. 

On Christmas Day, 1 846, Phil’s father noticed that it 
was more observed as a religious festival than ever before, 
the prominent stores, the offices on the great business 
wharves and the insurance places being closed the entire 
day, and the churches were crowded — quite a contrast 
to the time when the Puritans passed a law that any per- 
son caught celebrating Christmas Day should be fined five 
shillings. 

In 1 84 7 Mr. Brooks was confirmed in St. Paul’s Church, 
so in that year he celebrated Christmas Day as it should 
be, by “ receiving ” at the Lord’s Supper. 

When Phillips was six years old the Rev. Alexander 
H. Vinton, D. D. became the rector of St. Paul’s Church. 
He was the foremost preacher in the Church and remark- 
ably influential in her administrative councils. Dr. Vinton 
passed the test also for muscular Christianity, for his noble 
presence was immortalized by the City of Boston in the 
Soldiers’ Monument on the historic Common in the act of 
blessing the departure of the troops for the front in the 
Civil War. As in all teaching the personality of the teacher 
is supreme, it is well to grasp the personality of Dr.Vinton 
and the fact that his mother had been the greatest influence 
that had shaped his character, and she had filled his home 
life, as Mrs. Brooks was filling the home life, with her 
powerful presence. Dr.Vinton had studied for the medical 
4 


profession, and had been a practicing physician while hav- 
ing only an intellectual conviction of Christianity, but as 
soon as he became a follower of Christ he gave himself 
immediately to the Church, for to him “ to be a Christian 
and to be a Christian minister went together.’* His vital 
experience during the training for and practice in the med- 
ical profession helped him profoundly to be an ideal pastor 
to his people, for he then gained, and never lost, that mar- 
velous quickness of perception and observation. His sixteen 
years as rector of St. Paul’s Church was one of the most 
effective Boston ever had, and coming upon the close of 
the short but powerful ministry of Dr. Stone it had a grand 
chance of making itself felt upon the Church in particular 
and the community in general. The most prominent thing 
about Dr. Vinton beside his physical greatness and his 
mental vigor was his intense love for Christ and his marvelous 
gift of making religion seem to the young people of Boston 
. the most natural, the manliest, the greatest and most glo- 
rious thing in all the world, and one of his means of reach- 
ing the hearts and helping to form the characters of the 
future citizens of this country was through his Bible class, 
in which he carefully taught and trained the mothers. This 
Bible class Mrs. Brooks attended faithfully, and she passed 
on to her six boys through her own personality what she 
there learned. Dr. Vinton insisted that the parents of his 
Sunday School children and his teachers should attend 
these classes. These public addresses for religious training 
went out of fashion because the clergy did not prepare 
themselves sufficiently as to methods and subjects. But in 
the time of the training of the Brooks boys they were a 
part of the lives of the intellectual mothers of those days, 
and of the Sunday School teachers. At Trinity Church 
there was a strong public training class of the same kind 
as Dr. Vinton’s, at which the mother of the present writer 
was not only catechised most severely before the congre- 
5 


gation, but made to tell how she intended to convey her 
knowledge to her class on the next Sunday. She was not 
only compelled to give clear reasons for the faith she 
possessed, but to express how she intended to convey 
that faith to the members of her class. In England such 
classes were common, and men like Gladstone and other 
notables attended them on Sunday afternoons. 

The Brooks pew was a little over half way down the 
middle aisle from the chancel of St. Paul’s, number 60, and 
the Morgan pew was the last one on the middle aisle on 
the opposite side. Though the pews were high and antique 
it was utterly impossible in the Brooks pew for any boy over 
five feet in height to “crunch down” or even double up in 
such a way that Dr. Vinton, a giant among men, could not 
see whether he were attentive or not to the service of 
worship or to the sermon. 

It is curious to note that the greatest American church- 
man and the greatest American financier, John Pierpont 
Morgan, should have attended St. Paul’s Church and Sun- 
day School, and should have come under the wonderful 
spiritual teaching and personality of the Rev. Alexander 
H. Vinton, D. D. It was at St. Paul’s Church then that 
Phillips Brooks learned to love the Episcopal Church and 
the Book of Common Prayer, both of which became in- 
tegral parts of his life. Y et his earliest recollection of his 
religious training was by his dear mother’s side, and when 
her boys were in bed, just as they were going to sleep, 
she told them Bible stories. On Sundays the whole family 
went twice to church, and while the boys were in Sunday 
School their mother taught a class in the mission on Pur- 
chase Street, where also the mother of the writer taught, 
as well as in Trinity Sunday School. Sunday evenings the 
Brooks boys learned hymns and recited them so that by 
the time Phillips went to college he could repeat about 
two hundred hymns, and he never forgot them. When he 
6 


was twelve years old he kept a notebook in which he 
learned to record accurate observations. 

At the Boston Latin School the pupils had a thorough 
training in the classics and in the fundamentals. Most of 
Phillips’ compositions were carefully preserved. His first 
subject was “ California,” the next one was “ Slavery,” and 
when he was fourteen he wrote “ The Evils of War ” and 
“ The Pleasures of Memory,” the latter almost received 
the highest mark, and in it the home is the uppermost thought. 
In an essay written the same year, called “ Solitude,” he 
revealed a deep quality and a freedom prophetic of the 
future. 

At home the boys were told of the evil suggestions lurk- 
ing to catch the unwary in current and past literature, and 
therefore the parents were most careful that no injurious 
religious or secular teaching should run counter to what 
they believed was the truth, and no books were allowed 
in the home which were dangerous and misleading on any 
subject. Phillips wrote an essay on “ Books, Their Value, 
Good and Bad Influence,” which received the next high- 
est mark in the Latin School and which showed that his 
reading at fourteen had been extensive. In this essay he 
used what was to become one of his favorite illustrations of 
truth, that of the sunlight, and he announces that he will read 
the best literature and that he is sure his conscience may 
be trusted as a guide to truth and purity. He tried for two 
prizes on the assigned subjects, ‘‘Mathematical Pursuits” 
and “ The Shipwreck,” but failed. In 1851 he received 
a prize for good behaviour in school and when he grad- 
uated from the Latin School he was one of the six pupils 
who took the Franklin medal for excellence in the final 
examinations in Latin, Greek and mathematics. When he 
was fifteen his writings showed a firmer touch, were more 
intense, and his vocabulary richer and deeper. He seemed 
absolutely certain of his own thoughts and experiences, and 


felt compelled to give them utterance. What he stated as 
a youth was the foundation of what he taught all through 
his life. He showed a judicial mind, a thorough grasp of 
the right method which included all angles of a subject 
or question or problem, and the way to treat each side or 
angle. In his early essays one can trace the continuity of 
his growth from boyhood to manhood. There are no sharp 
turns, but one part grows naturally out of the former part ; 
each step is a preparation for the next in the development 
and fulfilment of his character. Just as Professor Horne 
shows in his book, “PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF 
EDUCATION,” so the mother of Phillips Brooks discov- 
ered for herself that there are no religious sections in human 
nature, and this is just what the latest psychologists and 
pedagogists are publishing to the world of today. There is 
no such thing as a man being a religious ANIMAL, for it 
is not man’s physical body which is religious, but his spiritual 
nature, his will, his emotions and his intellect, his body being 
only the medium of his earthly existence and is occupied 
only temporarily, and even while so occupied the body 
changes completely every few years, but his personality 
remains the same. We are spirits rather than we have 
souls. It is a law of the physical body that if we do not 
exercise any portion of it we soon lose the use of it. If we 
sprain our ankle and do not use it till the sprain has healed 
it will require a longer time to regain the use of the ankle 
than it did to get over the sprain, and the same law works 
in the same way through our spiritual nature. Therefore, 
if in the eduational progress we neglect the development 
of the religious faculties it is not merely that we cheat the 
child of his birthright, but we cheat the nation of its most 
efficient citizens. The religious education should be from 
the moment a child is born, nay, before he is born, a growth 
of the child’s whole nature towards God. Religion is sim- 
ply and clearly the whole consciousness in its relationship 
8 


to God the Father Almighty in Jesus Christ our Lord. 
Christian religious education is bringing man into the right 
relation with God through Christ our Saviour, and if the 
right relation with God is firmly established then man’s love 
and care for his fellow-man will naturally follow, for it will 
be the expression of God’s impression. 

Children are religious by racial inheritance through their 
feeling, and their will ; in adolesence through their minds 
(intellect), for it is “ one of the wonderful new facts that 
adolesence is likely to strengthen the tendencies the child 
brings with him. When reason does come with its full force 
into the individual life there must be a background of solid 
habit and good training whose value attests itself. The 
important thing to recognize is that there is a religion that 
children have, comprising the very germs from which all 
later development is to spring. * * * In later childhood 
these germs develop rapidly and new ones are added, so 
the scientific students of human nature, antropologists, soci- 
ologists, psychologists alike, unite in affirming an intimate 
relationship between the social and religious instincts.” 
(Horne.pp. 35 1,352, 356). 

There are three great educational agencies surrounding 
children : the home, the Church, the school, each one a 
social institution. The home should be the main agency of 
moral and religious education, for the parent is the natural 
and most influential character-builder and the home is the 
centre of heredity, environment and will. The Church, 
through its many and varied agencies, is trying to supplement 
and not to supplant it ; the public schools are nobly educating 
portions of the nature and character of the children intrusted 
to their training, and they are just beginning to realize that 
it is their business and privilege to educate all the inher- 
ent capacities of the children committed to their charge 
if they want to make the most efficient citizens of them , 
and therefore they are considering ways and means, such 
9 


as the Gary plan, which coordinates the will of the parents, 
the training in the schools and the teaching of the Church. 
Even “ Business” of this great country of ours is no longer 
on the side of a one-sided education of children, for the 
editor of the New York Wall Street Journal stated in an 
interview that “ NOW is the psychological hour for a 
spiritual awakening because there is an undercurrent of re- 
spect for higher things in the business world, a turning away 
from materialism.” (New York Churchman, p. 605, May 
8,1915). 

Now Mrs. Brooks was an up-to-date psychologist and 
pedagogist for she did not cheat her six boys out of their 
religious training at home as well as in the Church. She 
was a great MOTHER because she recognized that 
“ there is a religion that children have, comprising the very 
germs from which all later development is to spring,” and 
that “ adolescence is likely to strengthen the tendencies the 
child brings with him. When reason does come with its 
full force into the individual life there must be a background 
of solid habit and good training whose value attests itself.” 
(Home, p. 35 1). From the very beginning Mrs. Brooks 
concentrated all her energy and her prayers first on her 
boys’ spiritual and religious training and then on their 
physical development. She always put first things first. 
She studied the best means of training them and used every 
possible avenue of approach. The atmosphere of the home 
was spiritual and permeated with love, she was never 
chasing around to try to find somebody else who would 
train her six boys while she was having what is called to- 
day “ a good time,” or working for the community instead 
of training her boys to work for the best interests of the 
world at large. She lamented sometimes that her position 
in life was such a humble one, just a stay-at-home. The 
power of suggestion she used constantly, and by a thou- 
sand different ways she taught her boys to be true Chris- 
10 


tians; they literally absorbed spiritual and intellectual food 
into their very blood from the ideal family life in which 
they grew to manhood. The mother had the spirit of the 
true reformer who is bound to set the world right and to 
hasten the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. 
Often and often she would urge her husband to right 
some civic wrongs, or to strengthen the hands of those 
citizens who were working for the uplift of the community. 
As the family income was small when the boys were young, 
she served the family with her own hands and gloried in it. 
Though her social talents would have made her a power 
in the city of Boston, she chose the quiet household, se- 
cluded from the world, and everything was sacrificed to 
the welfare of her boys. She never accepted an invitation 
from home for any social affair till her youngest son had 
grown up. Visitors came in occasionally for a call or to 
spend the evening. The evenings were spent by the whole 
family around the large table in the “ back parlor,” the 
father at his literary tasks, the mother with her sewing, 
and the boys preparing their lessons for school. After the 
lessons were learned there were games dear to the hearts 
of all boys, and sometimes the newest book was read aloud. 
They all loved their home intensely and its influence was 
stamped on their hearts forever, and whenever the sons 
were away from home on visits, or later when they were 
fulfilling their professional careers, the mother’s letters 
always followed them with constant assurance that they 
were remembered every moment, and that she counted the 
days when she should see them again. She would send 
them boxes of “ goodies ” with the injunction that when 
they were eating them they must think of her. And when 
a letter from one of the boys was due, the little boys would 
bring it up from the post office and the mother would put 
away her sewing or mending to read it aloud to the eager 
group around the table, and their dog “Trip” would break 
II 


out in one of his awful spells of delighted barking and 
wagging of his tail, as if he knew one of his friends had 
written that letter. After the joyful reading Mr. Brooks 
would get out his large old-fashioned candle, the sewing 
would be put up for the night, and all would go up the 
old stairway and to bed. All through his life Phillips Brooks 
said over and over again that he owed everything to his 
mother. 

His father was a typical Boston merchant, upright, a 
genuine citizen, quick to help in civic and social relations. 
He studied the men and women and movements of his 
day, and had a rare and common sense judgment in all 
Boston’s interests, and in the larger interests of the nation 
and of the world. He had fine administrative ability, which 
Phillips inherited, was very methodical, could express him- 
self in clear, logical and effective language, was intensely 
interested in historical studies, had a taste for architecture, 
was very accurate in all he said and did, had a keen sense 
of humor, and prized his faith in Christ as the prime pos- 
session of his life. The ideal of helpfulness was planted in 
the Brooks boys at an early age, for every one of them 
was taught to do some useful act each day, which is one 
of the rules today of the Boy Scouts. The mother made 
real to her boys the first great truth of Christianity — that 
“ Christianity is Christ.” 

When Phillips was not quite sixteen he entered Harvard. 
While attending college he returned home every Saturday 
to stay till Monday, so he still attended St. Paul’s Church 
twice on Sundays. He had almost reached his full height 
of six feet four and one-half inches, and he weighed 1 6 1 
pounds. Such men as Longfellow, Agassiz and Peirce 
were his teachers. He was one of 628 students. The 
Harvard boys were required to attend daily prayers at 7 
A. M. from September to April, and at 6 A. M. from April 
to the end of the college year in July. 

12 


Cambridge was still a village, and was connected by 
omnibus or stage with Boston. In the evening the stage 
suspended operations at an early hour, which made walk- 
ing from Cambridge to Boston a necessity. The first horse 
car made the going and coming easier in 1856. Kerosene 
oil lamps lighted Boston, and oil was not replaced by gas 
till about 1855. Cricket was a favorite game, baseball was in 
its infancy, football as yet undeveloped as a great game in 
America. For these games and for games of chance Phillips 
showed not the slightest interest. He cared very little for 
even walking, because his rapid physical growth and men- 
tal development required all his strength and left him weak 
till he had attained manhood; physical rest was what he 
needed at this time of his life, for he had a very delicate 
and nervous constitution, susceptible to external influences, 
especially to bad, damp weather. Into the rest of college 
life he entered with zeal and enthusiasm. 

At an initiation of the Hasty Pudding Club Mr. James 
K. Kosmer relates in his book, “The Last Leaf,” (p. 256) 
how he recognized Phil Brooks in a tall fiend in scanty 
black drapery who was the most vociferous of the imps 
who tossed him in the blanket and later daubed his elab- 
orate manuscript with hot hasty pudding from a huge spoon. 
On another occasion the Club gave a performance of 
Fielding’s extravaganza of Tom Thumb. The performance 
was prepared with much care, and the hit of the evening 
was Phil Brooks as he personated the giantess Glumdalsa 
to perfection. He was dressed in flowing skirts and a fine 
dress waist, and wore an enormous headdress of what 
looked like feather dusters which swept the ceiling as he 
walked about majestically. Mr. James Kosmer was imper- 
sonating the princess, and he and Phil were rivals for the 
affections of Tom Thumb. “In the closing scene the entire 
cast underwent destruction, strewing the stage with a pic- 
turesque heap of slain. We were not very dead, for the 
13 


victims near the footlights, in order to give the curtain room 
to fall, drew up their legs or rolled out of the way in a 
spirit of polite accomodation. The most impressive part of 
the spectacle was the defunct giantess, whose wide spread- 
ing draperies and headgear, as Brooks came down with a 
well-studied crash, took up so much of the floor that the 
rest of us had no room left to die in dignity. The piece was 
so much of a success that we performed it again at the 
house of Theodore Lyman in Brookline, and still again at 
(dickering Hall in Boston.” (Kosmer, pp. 256, 260). 

Phillips’ record in college shows that he possessed 
the capacity for exact scholarship, ranking fifth in his 
freshman year. At the end of his sophomore year he 
ranked sixteenth in a class of 7 1 . As junior and senior he 
stood thirteenth in a class of 66. Whatever his grade for 
the daily examinations might be, he generally reached the 
highest in the final examinations. He loved history, did 
well in chemistry, and read enough in natural sciences to 
get the results of the scientific processes. In Greek he took 
the highest marks, and next to the highest in Latin. He 
read Greek literature all his life just for the pleasure of it. 
As elocution was coupled with literature, he only achieved 
100 where the highest mark was 140 in his sophomore 
year. He was very much handicapped by extreme shyness 
and he thought that to cultivate the powers of elocution 
would make him vain, and that if a man really had something 
to say he would find a way to say it, a truth which his own 
life amply vindicated. As a speaker in his college days 
he was marked by the same rapidity of utterance which 
characterized his public utterances all his life; this rapidity 
of speech was constitutional, and not adopted to cover up 
a physical defect; it was simply because his thoughts ac- 
cumulated with such voluminousness that his speech could 
not at first get the pace, and it seemed at the opening of 
an address that his words tumbled over each other in 


their haste to get cut, but almost immediately his thoughts 
gauged the speed necessary and then his words flowed on 
in majestic rhythm. 

He read with such lightning speed that he could finish 
a book and grasp its motive and contents and be ready 
for the next one while the other students were getting 
through the first chapter. He was always a great reader 
of life, as well as of books, and there was no use trying to 
fool him on any subject, for he could look straight into one’s 
heart and know what was going on there. This power did 
not prevent his helping unworthy persons sometimes, for 
if he only helped those who were worthy his helpfulness 
would have been very limited. 

In the necessary themes at college he did what was 
required, but his mind and heart were not stirred unless he 
had a subject with which he was in sympathy, and then 
he reached his highest level. His college papers show 
what Phillips had been doing with his time; they were 
written to be read in thirty minutes, and of course his half 
hour contained more than twice as much as anybody else’s. 

The essay “On National Greetings and Sports as Hints 
on National Character” proved how wide a knowledge 
he had of his subject, and his perfect mastery of the 
material. He gave the spirit of it rather than a summary 
of facts. In his junior year he wrote the most complete of 
his literary efforts and called it “The EnglishTableTalkers.” 
“ The style has the free swing and graceful ease of his 
later work. There is a tone of mastery and power, he 
utters himself with confidence as though he knew, and the 
whole paper is environed with a genial happy atmosphere. 
* * * He takes occasion in this paper, when speaking 
of Walpole, to give an estimate of the value of letter 
writing. * * * ‘As a general thing we read letters to be 
interested and informed, but not improved; and so if inter- 
est and information, but not improvement, are the result, 
15 


we have no thought of a complaint or breach of promise, 
men do not drop true genius into the post office, or trust 
the evidence of a great soul to the letter-hag / This pro- 
nounced opinion upon the value of letter writing formed 
at the age of eighteen, he seems to have retained as a 
permanent conviction. He wrote many letters full of inter- 
est and information, but never with the intention of drop- 
ping the evidence of a great soul into the post office/* 
(Allen,“Life and Writings of Phillips Brooks,” vol. II, p.85). 

In his junior year he won the first Bowdoin prize by 
his essay on “Teaching of Tacitus Regarding Fate and 
Destiny/* He graduated when he was nineteen, and on 
his commencement day, July 17, 1 85 5, he read a paper 
which he entitled “ Dissertaiion-Rebaut, the Huguenot 
Preacher.” He had about five minutes in which to deliver 
it, but with his rapidity of utterance he managed to cover 
considerable ground. When men make speeches of five 
or ten minutes’ duration they choose that aspect of the 
subject which appeals to them personally, which they con- 
sider of vital importance, and which is the summing up of 
the result of their own study of the subject. The college 
period of a young person’s life is the reconstruction period 
and crisis; the time of the mastery of facts and their veri- 
fication, and especially the gathering up of general mate- 
rials for the great thesis, so that Phillips Brooks’ choosing 
the strong faith which Rebaut inherited from the ages as 
his thesis and as the last word he should speak publicly 
as a Harvard student, shows what a vital thing faith was 
to Phillips Brooks THEN, and that the subject of a great 
Preacher was near his heart. He also emphasized and 
stoutly maintained that it was Rebaut’s faith that made 
Rebaut one of the greatest men in France, and that such 
lives teach the world how to live and how to perpetuate 
their witness of the power of a great faith. 

During his college days, and in fact during all his life, 
16 


Phillips Brooks was strongly marked by a deep, impene- 
trable reserve which was absolutely impervious to all attacks, 
although he was frankness itself about surface things. His 
friendship was prized and some evidence was apparent 
among the students of that personal devotion to him 
which was afterwards to reach such extravagant propor- 
tions. One might have lived in the same house with him 
for fifty years and yet never really know him. He has 
explained this characteristic, and it is not so uncommon as 
is generally supposed. One can only reveal one’s real, 
innermost personality to a person capable of understanding 
it; one can only give what the other is capable of receiving. 

After graduating Phillips was conscious that he ought 
to help the family resources in educating his four younger 
brothers, especially as William, the eldest Brooks boy, was 
already in business and doing his share of helping. What- 
ever profession his heart was set on it was evident that he 
must begin to support himself, so it was a case of family rejoic- 
ing when Phillips got the position as teacher in the Boston 
Latin School and began work in September, not yet hav- 
ing reached his twentieth birthday. This allowed him to 
take time to earn money for his own further education, and 
for him to help his mother besides. He felt that his true call- 
ing was teaching, and so it was, but it was the method of 
teaching and the medium through which he was to teach 
that needed illumination, and which his experience in the 
Latin School most decidedly illuminated and turned him 
to teaching through the Church, and not through the 
public schools. 

The headmaster of the Latin School was an athlete 
who used the rod unsparingly, and he believed that a 
good teacher was born, not made, and as Phillips had 
chosen to accept the invitation to teach he might as well 
prove first as last whether he knew how. He was given 
a younger grade of boys to try his hand on, among 
17 


whom was the younger brother of the present writer’s 
mother. In a month he was promoted to third class 
of boys from fifteen to seventeen years of age. Three 
teachers had already found this third class not only im- 
possible to teach, but to even keep in decent order. In 
those days the teacher was thought of only as an hered- 
itary enemy. Phillips’ youth, his inexperience, his eye- 
glasses, which were uncommon then, and his keen sense 
of humor were simply so much fuel to those boys, who 
studied only how to get the best of the teacher and to 
rout him completely, and they used great ingenuity in 
doing it. The thermometer was plugged with snow and 
when it registered zero the boys shivered and fuel was 
ordered to be put on the fire, the room being insufferably 
hot already, then the windows were opened and the op- 
posite process was begun. Another time a boy threw a 
handful of shot in Phillips* face, and when he looked up 
from his book no one could be detected as having done it. 
Another day the boys cut off the heads of the kind of 
matches that snap when stepped on, and scattered them 
all over the floor, even under the teacher’s desk, so that 
the least movement in any part of the room would be 
followed by an explosion. Once the teacher had to let a 
boy down out of the window to remove the plugs from 
the other side which had been stuffed into the keyholes 
of the door to prevent the teacher’s exit. One morning, 
looking up suddenly, Phillips saw every boy in the room 
wearing tin eyeglasses which they had made to imitate 
his own. By December he was tired out, “ sick, cross and 
almost dead,” and in February he resigned. His successor 
was also utterly worn out by the necessity of such frequent 
corporal punishment as that third class needed. 

By March Phillips was tutoring several pupils who paid 
well, but the work was not tending towards making a 
fortune. He felt his failure to control those Latin School 
18 


boys so keenly that he refused to go where he would be 
likely to see many people, but finally he mustered enough 
courage to call on the president of Harvard College. He 
knew that Dr. Walker’s advice would be based upon his 
understanding and personal knowledge of Phillips as a 
student, and as a young man, for Dr. Walker always won 
the confidence and love of the Harvard boys. 

The best boys do not think they are good enough to 
offer themselves for the ministry or for the mission field, 
and for this reason boys should be asked as individuals, 
and not as a crowd, to serve Christ as one of His ministers. 
How could such a young man as Phillips Brooks, who 
possessed a very sensitive and humble nature, offer himself 
as a candidate for “Orders” when he had just made such 
a miserable failure of being a teacher? Much to his amaze- 
ment, Dr. Walker advised Phillips to study for the ministry. 
No wonder he was so affected by his interview with the 
president of Harvard College, for an awful load had been 
lifted from his back, the load of conscious unworthiness of 
the profession of the Christian ministry. One of his class- 
mates, with more discrimination than most of the others, 
testified that he knew that in college Phillips had it in 
contemplation, and this classmate was therefore not at all 
surprised to hear that Phillips was studying for the ministry. 
After his interview with Dr. Walker, Phillips went to see 
his friend and rector, Dr. Vinton, to ask him what steps he 
should take next. Dr. Vinton told him that candidates for 
Holy Orders were usually communicants of the Church, 
and that conversion preceded confirmation; and while he 
was waiting to be confirmed he advised him to enter the 
Virginia Seminary immediately, as the term had already 
begun. It was then considered the best place to study for 
the Church in America. Phillips told only his family and 
then left for Virginia, just fifteen months from the day he 
graduated from Harvard College. 

19 


Chapter II 

ALEXANDRIA • PRAYER • PHILADELPHIA 
“THE QUESTION OF QUESTIONS” 

THE CIVIL WAR 

S OME of his frienck told Phillips that he was throwing 
himself away, that he was saying good-bye to intellec- 
tual freedom. Others said he was proclaiming himself 
better than his fellows, and that his chances of earning a 
decent living were mighty slim. During his life as a “priest** 
of the Church he often spoke of the glories of the ministry, 
and predicted that the following fifty years would give the 
Church a “ nobler opportunity of usefulness and power 
than it ever had in the past,’* and he called “with the 
voice of a trumpet to the brave, earnest, cultivated young 
men who are to live in the next fifty years to enter into it 
(th e ministry) and share the privilege of that work together. 
And the word with which I would summon them should 
be that great word * service.’ ’’ He said again and again 
that “There is no career that can compare with it for a 
moment in the rich and satisfying relations into which it 
brings a man with his fellow-men, in the deep and inter- 
esting insight which it gives him into human nature, and 
the chance of the best culture for his own character. Its 
delight never grows old, its interest never wanes, its stim- 
ulus is never exhausted. * * * The Christian ministry 
is the largest field for the growth of a human soul that this 
world offers. * * * It is a place of utterance more pow- 
erful and sacred than any other in the world.’’ 

The seminary as seen from the steamer on the trip from 
Washington was situated on a high hill, three miles from 
20 


the beautiful town of Alexandria. It was a large white, 
brick building with a cupola, planted in the midst of a 
forest of oak, hickory, cedar and locust trees which covered 
one hundred acres. From the seminary could be seen the 
splendid Potomac river, and the Capitol and Monument 
at Washington. The students were half from the North 
and half from the South, and were all very hospitable. 
To a New Englander things seemed about fifty years behind 
the times, and it took forever to get even the smallest kind 
of a job done. The life was simple and primitive, and 
compared with today so had been the life at Harvard 
College. This defect was more than balanced by the fact 
that each individual student counted for all he was worth, 
the college loved him for himself as an individual soul, 
whereas today Harvard, and all large organizations, love 
the student or member as an unknown quantity in a large 
body of students or members. We have all known teachers 
and leaders of even small groups who have loved us only 
as a class or organization, and not as individuals; just here 
is the difference between a great teacher and leader and 
all the lesser lights of learning and leadership. 

Even Washington, the capital of his country, had ap- 
peared to Phillips like a splendid skeleton affair with decid- 
edly shabby buildings. His first night was spent in the 
garret of an old building called the Wilderness, a few rods 
away from the main building, It had a bed very much too 
small for him, and a washstand. In the morning he woke 
up with a cold, and so cramped that he could hardly stand 
upright. He soon had a better room which he shared with 
the handsome and splendid son of Bishop Potter. 

The students took care of themselves, making their own 
fires, and some of them sawed their own wood. The ex- 
penses were one hundred dollars per annum; fuel, lights, 
washing, furniture and sundries were all extra. Phillips 
bought a cord of wood for three dollars. His washing cost 
21 


him two dollars a month, and he studied by candlelight 
until he bought a lamp. He was always very sensitive to 
bad weather, so he suffered considerably the first winter 
because sometimes there were three snowstorms in one 
week, the snow melting rapidly and leaving deep muddy 
roads. Until he bought a stove and moved into the new 
hall he found it impossible to even keep warm. The dining- 
room and prayer hall were in the basement. There were 
“ talks ” by the professors and a debating society which 
met once a week, when papers were read, discussed and 
criticised. 

Towards the last of November Phillips was laid up with 
a lame foot, and about the same time one of the students 
was told that he would be “ tarred and feathered ” if he 
did not leave the seminary immediately. Phillips stood by 
him and defended the right of free speech, which resulted 
in the faculty granting public discussion for and against 
slavery, and this open forum led many Southern men to 
modify their feelings and opinions, and helped the Northern 
men to a better understanding of the South. 

It was indeed a providential opportunity for Phillips 
Brooks to go from cold Boston to warm-hearted Virginia, 
and his life there developed him spiritually in a wonderful 
way. He learned a lesson which no books could have 
taught him, nor could have any Northern place drawn 
it out of him, because it is a something in the kindly, friendly, 
courteous, sympathetic and inherited atmosphere of the 
South which graces the cultivated men and women of 
that part of this great country of ours, and which has always 
been the most cherished characteristic of the best Southern 
family life. 

Until Phillips went to the seminary he had never been 
at a prayer meeting in his life, but he took to it quickly, 
probably the Brooks’ family prayers, though so different, 
helped to prepare him for it. The influence of the prayer 
22 


meeting at Alexandria was felt as long as he lived, for it 
taught him to pray aloud spontaneously in the presence of 
others, and there is absolutely nothing more difficult for a 
New England churchman to do, with his inherited reserve 
on personal spiritual subjects. The prayer meetings were 
held once a week, and when Phillips prayed every one 
felt how near and how real God was to him, that he was 
really talking with God; his prayers were so simple, yet 
blazing with such deep and well-grounded hope and ex- 
pectation. These prayers were the preparation for his 
marvelous prayer on the steps of Independence Hall at 
the close of the Civil War, and for his wonderful prayer 
on Commemoration Day in the enormous tent in Cam- 
bridge, and for all those other great prayers on various 
occasions. We forget how times have changed, and that 
those spontaneous prayers of Phillips Brooks mark an epoch 
and a great spiritual awakening in the Episcopal Church. 
In those days of his early ministry, nay, even after he re- 
turned to Boston, he was almost brought to ecclesiastical 
trial for daring to pray outside the Prayer Book. 

He has beautifully brought out the power of prayer 
and the wonderful peace of our unanswered prayers in 
his many writings. He tells us that some prayers Christ 
cannot answer because we ask Him to do our work for 
us, and again because we are not able to appropriate or 
understand the answer, and also we do not recognize the 
largeness of God’s Kingdom. 

During the Christmas holidays his mother and one of 
his brothers paid Phillips a visit, and on Christmas Day he 
made his first Communion, kneeling by his mother’s side 
at the altar rail of St. John’s Church in Washington. He 
had not been confirmed, but the Prayer Book says, “And 
there shall none be admitted to the Holy Communion until 
such time as he be confirmed or ready and desirous to be 
confirmed. ” We must remember that private confirmations 
23 


were and are rare, and that it was natural for Phillips to 
wish to be confirmed by his own bishop, for he was still 
under the jurisdiction of Dr. Vinton and the Bishop of 
Massachusetts; besides traveling was very expensive and 
consumed much more time than it does today. 

In April he wrote to his brother that he was feeling blue 
and homesick. His wardrobe was extremely shabby and 
he was afraid he would grow indifferent to his personal 
appearance. By June he had given up all idea of not re- 
turning to the Alexandrian Seminary. When he first went 
there he thought he would have been better prepared for 
the ministry elsewhere; as the months rolled by he found 
he was doing such prodigious studying outside the regular 
courses that he was not wasting his time, but taking his 
theological training into his own hands, which was a wise 
proceeding because wherever he would have studied at 
this time of his life he would have thought the teaching not 
equal to his demands, for one could not expect two Phillips 
Brookses under the same roof. Greek and Latin were not 
dead languages to him, but fascinating means of entering 
into the minds and experiences of great thinkers. German 
and French were both so familiar that he could understand 
all the heretical writings in the original, and did not have 
to wait for an English translation. Hebrew he did not 
enjoy, but as a classical writer or scholar none excelled him. 
After he had read his essays Dr. Sparrow would remark: 
“Mr. Brooks is very remarkable,” and the students felt that 
he certainly was, besides having a character of singular 
purity, strength, humility and helpfulness. He was full of 
fun also, and loved a good story. After the midday meal 
he would often call on another student and enjoy a cup 
of tea or coffee with a Maryland biscuit. He would fill 
the cup full of lumps of sugar and then pour the coffee or 
the tea into the spaces between the lumps. The students 
made tea in a large mug, covered with a red pincushion 
24 


shaped like a tomato, which gave the tea a much prized 
flavor. He returned home just before the closing of the 
seminary, and on July 12, 1856, he was confirmed by 
Bishop Eastburn in St. Mary’s Church, Dorchester. At 
this time he was twenty-one, his elder brother, William, 
was in business; Frederick was fifteen and a Boston Latin 
School pupil; George, the next boy, was on a farm for the 
summer, and Arthur and John were called the “little boys,’* 
Arthur being eleven years old and John seven. 

Upon Phillips’ return to the seminary he had soon very 
serious trouble with his eyes, and then was laid up with 
neuralgia in his face. This second year, however, was a 
very happy one, still he was perfectly delighted when 
summer came once more and he could go home and live 
with his beloved family, especially his mother. He wrote 
her to be sure to be on the doorsteps to meet him. Once 
more the whole Brooks family gathers round the familiar 
table in the back parlor every evening, and Phillips devotes 
much time to helping his brothers in their studies. He often 
went with them to the menagerie and enjoyed it as much 
as they did. He was of great assistance to Fred, who was 
to enter Harvard in the fall, and between Fred and Phil 
there existed a most romantic affection. On the last day 
of October he returned to Virginia, and he was very proud 
to be given charge of the new preparatory department, 
where students were to be trained for admission to the 
study of theology. He also taught Latin and Greek, and 
in this way he earned his board and $500, which was all 
the faculty could afford to pay; Dr. Sparrow told him that 
if he would stay at the seminary after his ordination he 
would guarantee him a handsome salary. This evidence 
of faith in him as a teacher was balm to his wounded pride, 
for his failure as a public school teacher, to even control 
those horrid Latin School boys, still rankled. Dr. Sparrow 
was the teacher of theology, and was a man always willing 
25 


to meet boldly every skeptical objection of the age, for 
the centuries were strewn with wrecks of religions intended 
to replace Christianity, and he was not afraid of any new 
ones. 

During these years Phillips kept very carefully written 
note books in which he wrote the sum and substance of 
his immense reading which could be used later; significant 
phrases, concise and terse descriptions and affirmations, 
comparisons and similarities and metaphors. Many people 
like to think that his wonderful wealth of expression and 
fluent, graphic style and beauty of ideas and forcible pre- 
sentation of his subject werevspontaneous utterances instead 
of the result of years of preparation and the training of a 
native talent, thus pouring soothing oil on their own lazi- 
ness evidenced by their slip-shod literary efforts, whether 
in print or orally delivered. He wrote a good sized volume 
of verse which also helped to train him to express himself, 
his innermost thoughts and ideas, and it was an outlet to 
his glowing, ardent, passionate enthusiasm for truth. These 
sonnets and other verse were not intended for publication. 

In December Phillips’ mother wrote to him, in part as 
follows : “ My dear Child, I have stolen away from the 
parlor, and the girls and boys (this proves to the ‘Higher 
Critics* that Phillips had SISTERS in spite of all evidence 
to the contrary) and the closing Saturday night cares, into 
the nursery to write to you; to send you my wishes for a 
happy Christmas, and the enclosed ten dollars for a Christ- 
mas present, and I sincerely wish it was in my power to 
DOUBLE it. You must take it as a gift of love from your 
mother, who loves you ten thousand times more than she 
can ever tell you, or than you can ever know. As Christ- 
mas Day returns again 1 shall think very much of the 
pleasant one I spent with you last year, and especially of 
the happiness and gratitude felt on first taking communion 
with you. Oh, it was a HAPPY day, and my heart is 
26 


FULL of gratitude that I had lived to see my child con- 
fess his Saviour before men. God grant as LONG AS 
LIFE SHALL LAST, he may be His faithful disciple 
and devoted servant. * * * From your dear, devoted 
mother.” (Dated 1 85 7, Allen, vol. I, p. 208) 

Upon the urgent request of his father and mother he 
sent them a copy of his first sermon, and on November 
20, 1 858, his mother wrote: “My Precious Phillips, more 
precious than ever. * * * I hardly know how to tell you 
how happy I feel, * * * what beautiful texts you have 
chosen; they breathe all of Christ. * * * I have lived to 
see my prayer granted, that my child might preach Christ. 
* * * My heart is with you very much this winter, par- 
ticularly evenings when I know you are writing your ser- 
mons. It must be a delightful work to feel yourself pleading 
for Christ. * * * God keep you and bless you, and con- 
tinue to make you a blessing to the world and to your 
devoted mother.” (Allen, vol. I, p. 280) 

“When I want to urge my friends to one entire salva- 
tion, in which all the partial salvations of conduct, of hap- 
piness, of taste, shall be included, I can ask nothing larger 
than this old question which has summoned such multitudes 
of people to the higher life, and which will be dear in 
their remembrance throughout eternity — the Question of 
Questions, will you not give yourself to Jesus ? * * * 
There are different measures in which men give themselves 
to Christ, and Christ despises none of them; but in different 
measures He again is compelled to give himself back to 
them. * * * Each gets from Jesus that which the nature 
which he brings can take. With what measure each gives 
himself to the Saviour, the Saviour gives Himself in His 
Salvation back to each. * * * He in His love outgoes 
our prayers. He gives us more of what we need than we 
know how to ask for. * * * And He is always trying to 
make the self which asks a larger self that He may give 
27 


it other things of higher kinds. But yet the truth remains, 
that at each moment He can give Himself to us only as 
at that moment we give ourselves to Him.” (“ Sermons 
Preached in English Churches,” published in 1883 by 
E. P. Dutton & Co.) 

On Friday, July 4, 1 839, Phillips Brooks was made a 
deacon. He had been called to the Church of the Advent 
in Philadelphia. It seated about five hundred persons, and 
had 1 3 0 communicants, a large Sunday School, and the 
salary was $ 1 000 a year. Dr. Vinton had planned to 
have Phillips for his own assistant, and was much disap- 
pointed when he decided to accept the call to the Church 
of the Advent. He took up his work there on July 1 0, 
when he preached both in the morning and in the after- 
noon. In the following spring, on Whitsunday, he was 
ordained by Bishop Potter to the Priesthood of “The 
Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of Amer- 
ica,” in the presence of his father, mother and brother 
George, who were in the congregation. In the evening 
he preached and his mother heard him for the first time. 
His ministry in Philadelphia was full of deep interests and 
he found his work to be even greater than he had looked 
forward to. The month of August ( 1 860) he took for his 
holiday. His brother Frederick was a sophomore at Har- 
vard, Arthur was in the Boston Latin School, and John 
was eleven years old. 

After his vacation he took up his work with vigor, great 
zeal and enthusiasm. The Sunday School occupied a large 
part of his time and interest, and he excelled in talking to 
children. He once told a child that it was great fun being 
a minister. He took infinite pains in preparing for the Sun- 
day School celebrations of Advent, Christmas, Easter, 
Ascension, Whitsunday and Trinity. He preached twice 
on Sundays, gave a weekly lecture on Wednesday even- 
ings, and on Saturday evenings had a large Bible class, 
28 


besides all the work incidental to a parish where the rector 
wanted to serve not only his own people faithfully but the 
community. He was not only a giant in spiritual ard in- 
tellectual force, but he was now six feet, four and one-h^lf 
inches tall and weighed 195 pounds. Yet withal he had 
a graceful and shapely figure because his body, like his 
soul, was finely proportioned. He had many calls to stronger 
parishes, for it had become known that a remarkable priest 
was at the Church of the Advent. 

When Dr. Vinton resigned the rectorship of Holy Trinity 
in Philadelphia, Phillips Brooks was immediately called to 
succeed him. He accepted and began his ministry there 
in January, after spending the month of December in Bos- 
ton with his dear mother. From this time he became public 
property, for he was a constant speaker at meetings and 
anniversaries; he became also one of the overseers of the 
new Divinity School in Philadelphia. The Civil War gave 
him an opportunity to become more widely known, till at 
last he spoke to the whole country. 

In civic work he became one of the foremost citizens, 
and admiration, adulation and frantic enthusiasm were 
aroused by his presence. Yet he was always glad and 
thankful to get away from such scenes and to be among 
a few friends, and he wanted those friends to remember 
that such marked evidences of popularity and fame had 
no intrinsic value. 

No one in the world ever so distinctly illustrated in his 
own life the two scenes in the Transfiguration time in the 
life of Christ, for Phillips Brooks made the same lightning 
change from the spiritual exaltation of the pulpit to the 
ordinary commonplaces of life as did Christ when He was 
transfigured on the Mount and then descended to that 
quarreling, fighting, distracted crowd at the foot. Revelation 
of the soul of Phillips Brooks through his sermons, address- 
es and teaching, in which he seemed to take his listening, 
29 


spellbound people into heaven itself, had to be followed 
by the commonplace out of the pulpit because he had such 
a genius for reaching the hearts of us, and psychologically 
we cannot have the heights without the valleys too. 

As many people have no idea that the American Epis- 
copal Church calls her ministers “ priests,” it is well to refer 
them to the Prayer Book, and to the very interesting refer- 
ence to himself as a priest in the writings of Phillips Brooks. 
On the Incarnation, and on the Suffering Saviour on the 
Cross, and on many, many subjects, he has written most 
illuminatingly and clearly, in fact some of his sermons should 
be published as tracts, and sold for five cents, to help the 
world of the present day. For purposes of verification of 
what he did or did not believe and teach there must some 
day be a distinction drawn between those volumes which 
were published during the life of Phillips Brooks and those 
which were published after his death. And the publishers 
should see to it that they continue his unvarying habit 
“ when referring to Jesus Christ, of writing the personal 
pronouns He, Him, and His with a capital H. This silent 
witness to his sense of the separateness and preternatural- 
ness of the son of God is conspicuous and telling. To the 
eye of the reader it makes the very type bear testimony.” 
(Rev. Edward Abbott, p. 40 in a pamphlet on Phillips 
Brooks, 1900)^ 

Mrs. Brooks* sister, Miss Susan Phillips, was for some 
time in a hospital in Annapolis as a volunteer nurse; and 
George Brooks enlisted both in the Church and in the 
United States Army the same year. George was attractive 
in personal appearance, very manly, sincere, and greatly 
beloved by every one who came in contact with him. He 
did not go to Harvard but tried farming, and then he took 
up chemistry and graduated with high honors from the 
Lawrence Scientific School. He wrote to his brother 
Phillips from Camp Meigs that the way Phillips had talked 
30 


to him had helped him greatly to see his way clearly, and 
he had been convinced that he should hesitate no longer, 
but by being confirmed confess himself a soldier of Christ. 
So George had been confirmed before leaving Boston, 
and had rejoiced his mother’s heart by receiving the Holy 
Sacrament at the Lord’s Table kneeling at his mother’s side. 
Mrs. Brooks thanked God for accepting the offering of her 
child George, for whom she had prayed so earnestly. Her 
song of rejoicing was accompanied with the committance of 
George to the everlasting care and protection of God, both 
in times of war and peace. She prayed also that in case 
his country claimed his life in its service that her Saviour 
would welcome her dearest George into the Heavenly 
Kingdom. 

In February Phillips* father appeared unexpectedly in 
Philadelphia on his way to the South to see his son George, 
who was sick unto death, but he did not get there in time, 
for George died of typhoid-pneumonia on February 10. 
Phillips went immediately to Boston to be with his mother. 
George’s body was embalmed and sent home. 

It was Phillips’ activity for the cause of the negroes, and 
the ovation of many in Boston over the funeral of George 
Brooks as a soldier who had given his life for their eman- 
cipation, that caused the tension among the Copperheads 
of St. Paul’s Church to break out in unkindness shown 
towards the mother of Phillips and George Brooks, so that 
she thought it wiser to transfer herself and family to Trinity 
Church in the spring of this year, 1863. The transfer from 
one parish to another in the same city had absolutely noth- 
ing to do with the doctrines preached in St. Paul’s Church, 
but to the actions of those not in sympathy with the war. 
The Brooks pew in Trinity Church was two or three pews 
behind number 98, owned by the writer’s grandfather. 

On the previous Thanksgiving Day Phillips had com- 
mitted his pulpit to the support of the nation, and he was 
31 


henceforth a leader of the people. He had just preached 
a wonderful sermon which was afterwards printed for 
circulation at the request of sixty leading citizens of Phil- 
adelphia, and it was at once recognized as an event in the 
history of the nation; it was called “Our MERCIES OF 
REOCCUPATION,” and was a “masterpiece of inspired 
oratory.” From Sunday to Sunday he preached the Gos- 
pel message as if there were no war, and did his church 
work with tremendous energy, for his parish then as always 
occupied the foremost place in his heart and brain. He 
had the power of inspiring others to work. His presence 
was an inspiration, and he actually carried healing power 
when he went through the wards of the hospitals at Get- 
tysburg, and he showed no discrimination between the 
Northern and Southern soldiers, but did what he could to 
help them, writing letters for them, praying with them, 
visiting them in camp as well as in hospital, preaching to 
them as he was allowed the opportunity, baptizing them 
and preparing them for Confirmation. 

He was among the first to recognize the necessity of 
educating the hundreds of thousands of negroes who were 
now adrift with a freedom to which no previous training 
had prepared them. Years afterwards his acts of kindness 
to the colored people were gratefully remembered by them 
and resolutions were inscribed upon the minutes of the 
Bethany Literary and Historical Association of Washing- 
ton, D. C. 

In 1863 Frederick Brooks graduated from Harvard. 
He had taken the Bowdoin prize, and had been the class- 
day odist. He entered the new Divinity School of the 
Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and while there brought 
his brother Phillips close to the hearts, minds and souls of 
the students. Only one son was now left in the family cir- 
cle, for Arthur entered Harvard that autumn, leaving John 
at home, who was fourteen years younger than Phillips. 

32 


The desire to be a teacher and his great love for history, 
which he considered the basis of all other learning, together 
with his most intense dislike for his present immense pop- 
ularity, led him to consider seriously changing from being a 
minister of a city church to becoming a professor of eccles- 
iastical history in the new Divinity School in Philadelphia. 
He wrote to his father that the Church needed more minis- 
ters, and that it would be a great work for him to teach and 
to train young men for the ministry of the Church he loved 
so well; that it would be easy enough to get another priest 
for Holy Trinity at $4000 a year with its splendid con- 
gregation, but it would be difficult to get a teacher for the 
seminary at $ 1 000 per year, and as he was unmarried he 
could afford to go there, besides he needed the opportunity 
it offered for his own study; in order to give so much out 
he felt the need of time to replenish the supply in himself. 
Hardly anyone sustained him or encouraged him to bury 
himself in a theological school, and he therefore gave up 
the idea till seventeen years later, when he was called to 
the professorship of moral philosophy in Harvard Univer- 
sity. This time THE PEOPLE, literally “ the people ’* 
would not let him go, so he sacrificed forever the ideal of 
his youth, the inherited instincts, and the consuming desire 
of the scholar for such an opportunity as that professor’s 
chair offered Mr. Brooks. 

On the night of Good Friday, April 15,1 865, Abra- 
ham Lincoln was assassinated, and on Easter Day Mr. 
Brooks preached a wonderful sermon about Christ and the 
Resurrection, and about the martyred President. On the 
following Sunday he preached another remarkable sermon 
on the character of Lincoln, which was immediately pub- 
lished by request. He thought of Lincoln as the servant 
of a divine cause. The next well known and most talked 
of thing that he did was his prayer at the Commemoration 
Day at Harvard, when those who had died for their 
33 


country were to be remembered. It is still spoken of to- 
day with bated breath as “That prayer ! O that prayer!’* 
as if nobody else had ever prayed like that in public since 
the world began. 

From the day of that great prayer Boston longed for 
Phillips Brooks to return to the city of his birth, and as 
soon as the opportunity presented itself in 1868 in the 
resignation of Bishop Eastburn as rector of Trinity Church 
no stone was left unturned to persuade him to leave Phil- 
adelphia. Mr. Brooks declined the call. None of the letters 
or appeals, that he received on the subject could have 
moved him as did his mother’s letters. His refusal nearly 
broke her heart, for she claimed that he owed it not only 
as his duty toward his mother to come to Trinity, but as his 
duty toward the city of his birth and education. She 
wrote him that he owed Boston a DEBT, that she hoped 
he would live long enough to pay it, and that she prayed 
God that he might pay it during his mother’s lifetime. 

The very tightening of his heartstrings made him think 
that his real duty lay in Philadelphia, for had he not al- 
ready given up the chair of ecclesiastical history in the 
Episcopal Theological School, so how could it be right 
for him to obey one of the strongest instincts of his nature 
and training and “go home.’’ So on January 4 he again 
declined the Boston call. Both cities kept busy, one trying 
to keep him and the other trying to get him. Not till July 
did Phillips show any signs of changing his mind. Trinity 
Church was closed for repairs during the summer, but the 
vestry was hurriedly convened, and on July 5 another call 
was extended which was finally accepted, and on Sunday, 
October 24, he preached his last sermon as rector of Holy 
Trinity, and thus ended his ministry of ten very happy 
years in Philadelphia. 

During the summers when he had remained at his work 
he used to go with Dr. Weir Mitchell for an afternoon 
34 


pull on the river. One summer they went to Moosehead 
together; and he delighted to swim and paddle, for he 
loved nature and the life of the woods for recreation. He did 
not fish nor shoot because he hated to kill even a trouble- 
some insect. But it was HUMAN NATURE that he 
loved the most. A crowded city on a hot day, teeming 
with life, had no terrors for him because it contained God’s 
children for whom he had a message of hope and love. 

The Brooks family had moved from the familiar house 
at 3 Rowe Street (Chauncy Street) into an old house on 
Hancock Street, which had nothing “stuck up” about it, 
but where all felt immediately at home. Another point in 
its favor was its foundation, for it was built on the hard, 
rocky Beacon Hill, therefore entirely unlike the ashman’s 
rubbish heap called the Back Bay, where enormous piles 
had to be driven down far enough to reach something 
solid which would prevent the houses from disappearing 
from sight during the night. Its residents have often tried 
to appropriate the name of “West End” so to obliterate 
its humble origin, but the Back Bay it was and the Back 
Bay it will probably remain to the end of time, in name 
at least in the minds of real Bostonians. 


35 


CHAPTER III 

BESSIE’S PRICELESS FRIENDSHIP AND 
EXPERIENCE 

T HE wind was whistling up and down bleak Summer 
Street one very particular Sunday in the autumn of 
1869, but it was warm inside dear old Trinity and there 
was an excited, expectant attitude about even the cranky 
old sexton, for was not HE COMING. The children had 
arrived there earlier than usual and were gathering much 
information about him from each other and from their 
teachers. Above all things they wanted to know if he 
thought only of grown-ups, or would he come to Sunday 
School regularly ? 

“ He is big as a giant,” piped up one little boy. 

“ He loves children,” volunteered Bessie. 

“ How do you know ? ” snapped a big girl. 

“ He called at grandma’s and I saw him. He has got 
eyes like Jesus must have.” 

“ Little children should be seen and not heard,” inter- 
rupted the big girl jealously. 

Bessie shrank back in her seat as if she had been struck. 
The other children looked indignantly at the jealous big 
girl, and begged Bessie to tell them all she knew. 

“ What DO you know about him ? ” demanded the 
jealous girl. 

“You said I should be seen and not heard,” Bessie 
quietly reminded her. 

“ Oh, I say ! I ’m sorry I said that, please tell us before 
he comes.” 

Then Bessie, with her little hands clasped tightly, and 

36 


with a rapt, far away expression, told the greatest exper- 
ience of her eight years of life; she seemed to be talking 
it out with God rather than to the listening children. “ He 
came to see us because grandpa is an invalid and my papa 
is sick, and I was reciting a hymn to grandpa as he came 
into the room. Just as I was leaving the room he called 
me back and lifted me up on to his big knee and put his 
strong arm around me, and I leaned against his great big 
heart while he talked to grandpa. He would smile down 
on me with a regular Angel-Gabriel smile every few min- 
utes. Then suddenly he said: 

“ * So you know Jesus ? * 

“ Oh, yes, but how do you know I know ? 

“‘By the way you recited that hymn to your grandpa, 
for you are a little girl who hates to say anything that is 
not true. Jesus is my best, dearest and greatest Friend, so 
now you and I will always be friends because we have 
a mutual Friend in Jesus.’ 

“ Then he put me down very gently and prayed some 
beautiful prayers and said some comforting words to grand- 
pa, and just as he was going out of the door which I held 
open for him he held out both hands to me, and stooping 
his great body way down to little me, he kissed me and 
said: ‘God bless thee, Bessie, and may Christ dwell in 
thee always.’ ” 

In the awe-struck silence that followed, the door opened 
and in walked Phillips Brooks. As Bessie’s class was near 
the door he saw her at once, and after shaking hands 
heartily with Miss Hattie Thayer, her Sunday School 
teacher, he turned to her said: “Hullo, Bessie, how are 
grandpa and your mother ? ’’ 

When Bessie was nine years old she had her first ex- 
perience with death, for her grandfather died after years 
of much suffering. She had been accustomed to recite 
hymns to him Sunday nights, and she had been oppressed 
37 


by the signs of severe suffering in his face, but now she 
was fascinated by the majesty of death, for it had left her 
grandfather’s face absolutely peaceful, painless and happy, 
so it puzzled her to see the family’s sorrow when death 
had worked that transformation. While others were busy 
she sat quietly alone with him in the big drawing room 
upstairs, and as she gazed alternately at him and out of the 
window at the deer on the Common she suddenly saw 
Mr. Brooks coming to call. She ran lightly downstairs to 
open the door before he had time to ring, calling out joy- 
ously to her grandmother: “Mr. Brooks is coming!” Before 
he had time to take off his coat she had demanded: “What 
is death ? ” 

“At Home with Jesus,” promptly replied Mr. Brooks. 

“Then why do people cry when death comes into the 
house ? ” asked the little girl. 

“Because they don’t trust God enough,” said Mr. 
Brooks as he caught up Bessie in his arms and carried her 
upstairs. “Always remember that Jesus is taking care of 
you no matter what happens,” he added as he put her 
down gently in order to give his whole attention to the 
rest of the family. 

Thousands who are now living know in their own lives 
what Phillips Brooks was to them in the times of trouble, 
sickness or sorrow, and they know that only a man who 
lived very close to God every moment of his life could do 
for others what he did; and yet in his writings he still 
speaks to those who will listen. 

People who were ill in their minds he soothed, helped 
and blessed, and turned them from thinking only of them- 
selves tc living for Christ. One of them called one even- 
ing and outstayed the other callers. Mr. Brooks walked 
part of the way home with him, and when they had reached 
the Public Garden, he bade him good-bye at the foot of 
the statue of George Washington on horseback, bathed in 
38 


the glorious moonlight, with these words : “ Unto God’s 
gracious mercy and protection I commit thee. The Lord 
bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to 
shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift 
up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace, both 
now and evermore.” 

In the sick room, with children or with their elders, Mr. 
Brooks was wonderful, for he gave hope, strength and life 
to them, even when he did not talk much, and aside from 
his mere presence, his prayers for them, kneeling by their 
bedside, would bring healing because he was so near to 
God, and somehow if one were too ill to live much longer 
he made the passing heavenly. 

One of his little friends had diphtheria, and had it bad. 
She got the idea into her head that if her throat filled up 
with that horrid, dirty, white stuff she would be a “ goner,” 
and she argued to herself that so long as her voice came 
through it she would be a live little girl instead of a dead 
one, so she would say hymns and poems softly to herself, 
even though it hurt so, while the nurse was too busy or too 
tired to notice. At the height of her illness, when she felt 
the effort of ‘‘getting her voice through” was hardly worth 
the pain it caused her, she heard the dear, familiar voice 
at her door. Instantly she was galvanized into life, and she 
shouted out with great pain and difficulty, but with grim 
determination: 

“Go away, Mr. Brooks, go away or you will catch 
diphtheria.” 

As he opened the door of her room she raised herself 
up and cried again to him: 

“Oh, go away, dear Mr. Brooks! Just think how awful 
it would be for everybody if you caught it and died.” 

He hurried to her side, and taking her feverish hands 
in his, kissed her gently on the forehead, saying, “ Why, 
Bessie dear, if I should be afraid of ‘ catching it * from all 
39 


ihe sick people I visit I should have been dead long ago.’* 

“ Not afraid,” asked the little girl wonderingly, “ why 
aren’t you ? ” 

Then he told her in simpler language and in a very few 
words what he preached to older people, and which is 
written for all time in his sermon entitled ‘‘The Safety and 
Helpfulness of Faith,” from the text: “They shall take up 
serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not 
harm them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they 
shall recover.” (Mark XVI, 1 8). The main point is that 
the safety which Christ offers is a “safety not by avoid- 
ance of deadly things, but by the neutralizing of them 
through a higher and stronger power. * * * One thing 
we see immediately in such a promise, one condition which 
belongs to its fulfillment. It is that only in the higher action 
and mission lay the safety from the lower influence; and 
therefore that the lower influence was to be powerless over 
the disciples only as they met it incidentally in the direct 
pursuance of their higher task. * * * It is only when we 
are about some higher task, only when they meet us acci- 
dents in the service of Christ, that we have a right delib- 
erately to encounter temptation and the chance of sin, and 
may claim the Lord’s promise of immunity.” (“Twenty 
Sermons,” p. 339). 

From that day, so very many years ago, Bessie never 
has been afraid of “catching it” from anybody or any- 
thing in pursuance of her duty. It was a beautiful but awe- 
inspiring experience for her to be prepared by Phillips 
Brooks for confirmation, because he was not satisfied to 
know from her mother and from her Sunday School 
teacher that she was really ready, but he must judge for 
himself, and, strange to say, he was not an easy judge. He 
required from all those seeking confirmation evidence that 
they were having a real religious experience, and a longing 
to serve and obey Christ, with a true repentance of their 
40 


past sins. And on this point he never changed his attitude. 
He told Bessie’s mother that he always hesitated very 
much about so young a child being confirmed, though he 
thoroughly believed that the religion of childhood and 
youth was not only possible, but the normal type of reli- 
gion. As she had been brought up in a religious atmos- 
phere, her father having been a clergyman, she was better 
prepared than most children, but up to that time she was 
the youngest child to be admitted to the Lord’s Supper 
in Trinity Church. Later, all over the country, children 
of her age were confirmed. 

He told Bessie that she must talk to God about her 
wish to go forward to confirmation, and she replied that 
she had, and that God knew all about it, and she was 
afraid that Mr. Brooks might think she ought not to be 
because she failed so dreadfully often to do what was right, 
and she had to repent, that is be sorry, so often and yet 
did the same wrong thing over again; yet perhaps she 
needed all the strength the Church could give to keep her 
a faithful soldier of Christ, because though it was so dread- 
fully hard to obey Christ, it was easy enough to love Him. 
“You are the only person who never fails to please Christ,’* 
she told him, “ at least that is what everyone thinks.*’ 

“If you are not obedient you can do nothing, Bessie. 
If you would be strong you must be obedient, for self-will 
and wanting your own way is weakness, and only obedi- 
ence is the mastery and strength. You need never live 
alone, for it is in your power to know and obey God. 
That is what Christ claims you for. Give yourself to Him 
more and more completely every day in loving gratitude 
for what He did for you on the Cross. Follow Him always. 
I do not know His way for you, Bessie, but I know Him. 
Do His will, and everything must turn out for the best in 
your life to make of your character what God intended it 
should be. I welcome you into the Church, and may the 
41 


Holy Spirit live in your heart and make and keep Christ 
vividly real to you always, and make you dread to offend 
Him, and delight to please Him, and to do everything just as 
Jesus would have you do it, and may the Holy Spirit keep 
you always a faithful soldier and servant of Christ so that God 
can use you to bring others to Christ and His salvation.” 

A few years passed and Bessie went to her rector about 
her brother’s “doubts,” and how she could best meet them. 
Mr. Brooks gave her a list of books on Biblical and Sci- 
entific Criticism which he said “would even strengthen her 
own faith because she had a passionate desire for truth 
( her mother called it ‘ Being so very literal ’ ), and she 
really loved and served Christ, besides it was in the path 
of duty, so that skeptical books could not harm her, but 
from them she could understand better what was going on 
in her brother’s mind and in the minds of others whom she 
might help through her own strong faith, and thorough 
grounding in the reasons for it, for after all it is faith through 
personality that wins most souls. This was Christ’s method, 
for He taught His truth to His disciples and then told 
them to go and tell others. 

“ Christ prepared their personalities to be a fit medium 
for the communication of His Word. When His treatment 
of them was complete they stood fused like glass, and 
able to take God’s truth in perfectly on one side and send 
it out perfectly on the other side of their transparent 
natures.” (“ Lectures on Preaching,” p. 7). 

So that in dealing with unbelief successfully it “ will be 
not he who is most skilful in proving truth or disproving 
error, but he who is most powerful in strengthening faith 
in people’s lives by the way in which the power of faith 
is uttered through his own character. * * * And the re- 
assertion of the fact that Christ is Christianity.” (“ Essays 
and Addresses,” p. 7 1 . The phrase “Christ is Christianity” 
occurs elsewhere in his writings). 

42 


In his talks with Bessie Mr. Brooks said exactly what 
he said in the pulpit, only condensed, that is, the substance 
of the subject under discussion. In regard to her brother, 
he told her in part as follows: Be sure to remember that 
Christ had always been standing “ outside the fast closed 
door** of her brother’s heart, even if her brother had been 
both deaf and blind to His presence through ignorance, 
indifference, or from what was the trouble with so many 
unbelievers and doubters, that they possessed not one par- 
ticle of a self-sacrificing spirit, but lived for themselves alone, 
and demanded sight, not faith. Persuade the brother to 
state what he did believe, and upon that build the pres- 
ent and future faith, for God never wastes anything, but 
uses the past as the preparation for the future. The Holy 
Spirit was already in his heart because he was a child of 
God, created in His likeness, and when the brother recog- 
nized God’s voice then it would be possible for the Holy 
Spirit to take of the things of Christ and show them to the 
brother. Before Christ’s Cross he will have to learn to 
know the Suffering Saviour, for it is Christ’s death that 
saves the world, a fact and not a theory of atonement, and 
when the brother becomes grafeful for a love “so marvel- 
ously shown’’ it will lead him to long to serve Christ. “To 
know that the very God of heaven saw a want, a struggle, 
a longing of our souls after Himself, which was too deep, 
too obscure, too clouded over with other interests for even 
us to see ourselves, and came to meet that want with the 
wonderful manifestation of the incarnation, the atonement. 
We hear of the marvelous power of the Gospel, and we 
come to doubt it when we see the multitudes of unsaved 
men. But it is true. The Gospel is powerful, omnipotent. 
A truth like this, thoroughly believed, and taken in, must 
melt the hardest heart and break the most stubborn will. 
It does not save men simply because it is not taken in, not 
believed. The Gospel is powerless, just as the medicine 
43 


that you keep corked in its vial on the shelf is powerless. 
If you will not take it, what matters it what marvelous drugs 
have lent their subtle virtue to it? Believe and thou art saved. 
Understand and know, and thoroughly take home into your 
affection and your will, the certain truth that Christ saw 
your need of Him when you did not know it yourself, and 
came to help you at a cost past all calculation — really 
believe this and you must be a new man and be saved.” 
(“Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons,” p. 1 05). 

“It was in His incarnation that He became capable of 
uttering those qualities in which man might be like Him, 
which men might receive from Him and take into them- 
selves. Think of it. God had stood before men from the 
first, and they had looked with awe and adoration upon Him 
throned far above them. They had worshipped Him, they 
had feared Him, they had loved Him. Now and then some 
ardent and ambitious spirit soaring to the highest dream of 
the soul, or some patient and humble nature purified to deep- 
er insight by its humility, had conceived that man ought not 
only to worship and fear and love God, but to be like God, 
to reflect in his own obedient nature the perfections that he 
adored. But how ? What was it that he should reflect ? 
What was there in the Deity that could repeat itself in 
man ? Not His majesty, not omnipotence and not omni- 
science, surely. Men were bewildered, and other vague 
and impious attempts to match the inimitable glories that 
belong to divinity, like Eden or Babel; or else reckless 
discouragement and brutal despair, as if nothing that was 
in God could be restored in man, as in the countless Sodoms 
and Gomorrahs of the ancient world — these were the 
terrible results of the blind craving. Then came the incar- 
nation. Here was God in the flesh. Solemnly, that of the 
divine which was capable of being wrapped in and of liv- 
ing through the human, was brought close within that 
wondrous human life lived in a human body. There was 
44 


the God we were to imitate, to grow like to, to take into 
ourselves until He filled us with Himself. It was the in- 
carnate God; it was the God in the flesh that was to enter 
into man. This was the flesh we were to eat and by which 
we were to live. * * * Take the yet more wonderful being 
lying behind the acts of Jesus, all which Jesus was, and see 
how that, in its perfect consecration, its consecrated per- 
fectness, became clear and imitable to men; how men be- 
gan to believe that they might be that divine thing too 
when they saw it in the incarnate God, in Christ; and 
then, I think, you can understand something of how only 
in the flesh could God thus present Himself for the most 
intimate entrance into man; so can know something of 
what Jesus meant when he bade the hungry human soul 
eat of His flesh. * * * You look on high and God is 
too mighty. You look close by your side and Jesus Christ, 
the God incarnate, has the very words you need : ‘ He 
that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood dwelleth in 
Me and I in him.’ 4 This is the bread that came down 
from heaven.’ 4 He that eateth of this bread shall live for- 
ever.’ Then there is nothing left but to cry , 4 Come, come 
Lord Jesus.* But there is one thing more that I must say. 
This giving of His own flesh for our food is always spoken 
of in connection with the great sacrifice of the flesh in 
which He gave it for us. There is always this asssociation 
between the reception of the strength of the incarnate 
Christ and His crucifixion in which He willingly gave 
Himself up that He might furnish that strength to His 
people forever. The great Christian sacrament, which 
embodies this idea of which we have been treating, the 
idea of the feeding of the soul upon the flesh of Christ, 
is all filled full of memories of the agony in which the flesh 
was offered. What does this mean ? Does it not mean this — 
that however man longs for his God ; however man sees 
that in the incarnate Christ there is the God he needs and 
45 


whom his nature was made to receive; it is only when man 
sees that Divine Being suffering for him, only when he 
stands by the Cross and beholds the love in the agony, 
that his hungry nature is able to take the food it needs, 
that is so freely offered ? The flesh must be broken before 
we can take it. This is what Christ says, and the histories 
of thousands of souls have borne their witness to it, that it 
is the suffering Saviour in His suffering that saves the soul. 
* * * It is the death of Christ that saves the world.” 
(“ Candle of the Lord and Other Sermons,” portions of 
pages 247, 249. Published in 1881). 

The last quotation is given because it represents to Bessie 
what Phillips Brooks taught her in preparation for con- 
firmation, and is the substance of many of his Wednesday 
lectures, and those just before the first Sunday in the month 
when he prepared his people for the Holy Communion. 
He also taught her never to worry if she failed in helping 
those in trouble spiritually or mentally, that is, if the truth 
and the faith by which she tried to live did not help others, 
although as far as arguments can make a friend believe, 
“it does not help him in the least. He gets out of it nothing. 
And bye and bye you begin to feel where the difficulty is. 
He brings to the intellectual conception no spiritual 
condition which can summon forth its virtues. He has no 
craving after higher company, no hungry need of God, 
no high perception of the possibility of man. No self, 
rich, and at the same time needy, with all these, does he 
give to the sublime truth of the incarnation, and so it 
gives nothing back to him.” (“Sermons Preached in 
English Churches,” pp. 280, 28 1 ). 

To Phillips Brooks the “teaching of the Christian reli- 
gion, in its largest statement, is the bringing of the life of 
Christ into the life of man. * * * I am sure, if we could 
trace it, that the degree of the best feeling of various people 
toward various ministers would correspond very exactly 
46 


with the degree to which those different ministers realized 
themselves, and made real to their people the first great 
truth of Christianity, that Christianity is Christ.” (“ Essays 
and Addresses,” in article ‘‘The Teaching of Religion,” 
delivered at the Divinity School of Yale University, Feb- 
ruary 28, 1 878, p. 44). 

The Communion Service at Trinity Church was a very 
impressive sight, for neither organ nor choir stalls were then 
in the chancel; the choir of a quartet and mixed voices 
sat in the west gallery, where also the organ was played, 
therefore there was no confusion in the enormous crowd 
going up en masse to the Lord’s Table, as there was plenty 
of room to go up and then to return to one’s seat. The 
communicants surrounded the Lord’s Table, only kneeling 
instead of reclining, as was done when Christ instituted the 
Lord’s Supper. No boy or any kind of surpliced choir was 
seen in Trinity, except, of course, the procession of surpliced 
clergy now and then, till the Rev. E. Winchester Donald, 
who succeeded Dr. Brooks as rector, could no longer resist 
the demand for them. The surpliced clergy came into the 
chancel through the door leading from the robing room, 
which was walled up when the choir stalls were put in. 
Thus the Church changes its methods to help the people 
worship God, because it is and always has been aTEACH- 
ING CHURCH, and as the Church was thoroughly or- 
ganized before the New Testament was written, we hold, 
and this is a fundamental principle, that the Church was 
designed by our Lord to be the TEACHER of faith and 
practice, and that she is divinely guided in this function. 
We hold, therefore, that her faith constitutes a needed key 
to the teaching of Holy Scripture — the disregard of which 
we think is the true explanation of the wide divergence 
of Protestant bodies in their doctrine and practices. The 
Church to teach and the Bible to prove. 


47 


CHAPTER IV 

FREDERICK AND ARTHUR BROOKS • THE 
BOSTON FIRE • THE OLD AND THE 
NEW TRINITY CHURCH 

M R. BROOKS made it a rule to dine with his father 
and mother every Sunday, and after Dr. Vinton’s 
return to Boston as rector of Emmanuel Church, he spent 
the rest of the evening with Dr. Vinton, after he had 
preached his third sermon, for of course he was free to 
preach for others on those evenings of the Church year 
when there were only morning and afternoon services in 
Trinity. 

How rejoiced his mother’s heart must have been to see 
before her eyes three of her sons priests in God’s House 
at the ordination of Arthur in old Trinity in 1 870. To St. 
Paul’s Church belongs the honor of giving to the ministry 
both Phillips and Frederick, but it was Trinity that gave 
Arthur and John. It would be interesting to know how 
many of our clergy owe to Phillips Brooks the incentive 
to give their lives to the ministry, and how many from 
Trinity parish since 1869 have become special messen- 
gers of the Church. 

Arthur resembled Phillips in appearance and size very 
strongly, and both looked like their mother. Arthur was 
a fine preacher, an ideal pastor, and had high administra- 
tive ability. He would have been considered one of our 
great men if he had not been eclipsed by his celebrated 
brother. The Sunday after Easter Phillips usually ex- 
changed pulpits with him, and we could almost imagine it 
was Phillips himself preaching to us. A few years later 
48 


John, the youngest son, was ordained, being the fourth 
Brooks boy to give himself to our Church in the service 
of Christ. 

What a painfully keen blow was the second break by 
death in this wonderfully united family — when Frederick 
died suddenly as he was crossing the bridge over the 
Charles River one dark night. He had been on an errand 
of mercy, and on his way home to his mother’s, where he 
was staying, he got off the train at East Cambridge because 
it was a short-cut home, and then he fell through the draw 
and was drowned. His body was not found till five days 
later, on September 20, 18 74. He had been in great 
demand during his short life as a minister by those who 
appreciated thus early the sterling qualities of his character. 

The historic Boston Fire occurred in November, 1872, 
about eight o’clock on a Saturday night. Street after street 
in the business and ancient residential district, and block after 
block burned like a Fourth of July bonfire. It was a heart 
rending but magnificent sight. Thousands were thrown out 
of work, and many of Boston’s best and proudest citizens 
were reduced to practical poverty in a night. Sixty-five 
acres were burned over, causing a loss on buildings of 
$12,745,000 and on merchandise $38,434,000. The 
fire department was seriously handicapped at the outset by 
a delay in getting apparatus to the point of danger. For 
almost a week before the fire a strange disease known as 
“ epizootic ” had prevailed in Boston, and hardly a horse 
escaped its attack. The street railway service and team- 
ing were almost entirely suspended, and scarcely a vehicle 
was seen upon the streets unless drawn by oxen. The fire 
department had received orders not to use horses in re- 
sponding to alarms, and it was not an uncommon sight to 
see an engine or ladder truck being hauled through the 
streets by 100 or 150 men and boys who cheerfully 
manned the ropes that had been provided for the emer- 
49 


gency. Another reason why the fire got beyond control 
of the department was because of the insufficient supply of 
water. In Summer, Franklin and adjacent streets there 
were only six-inch pipes. These had been ample when 
these sections were devoted to private residences, but 
were inadequate for the changed conditions after the 
streets were given up to business. 

The buildings around the firm of C. F. Hovey & Co. 
were burned, but that firm escaped because many of their 
employees formed a fire brigade of their own and kept 
the roof and sides thoroughly wet at the risk of their 
lives, and the firemen were not allowed to enter at all. 
Dear old Trinity, almost opposite this firm on Summer 
Street, was attacked by the fire in the rear and was soon 
ablaze inside and out, except her grand old tower, which 
refused to budge and thus added a picturesqueness to the 
scene of desolation. Trinity Church burned in as stately a 
way as she had lived since being built in 1829, and in 
the building of which the writer’s grandfather and great 
uncle were very active members of the parish, and many 
years later when the grandfather became an invalid the 
vestry meetings were held in his home until he became 
too ill to have them there. The first Trinity Church in 
Boston was built in 1 734, and the writer’s maternal ances- 
tor, Rebecca, daughter of Jeremy Gridley, was a member 
of it. The first King’s Chapel had been erected in 1 689, 
and was just what its name implied, the official church of 
the representatives of the government of His Majesty King 
George II, and became greatly disliked by those Christians 
who were not in communion with the Church of England. 
During the American Revolution Trinity Church stayed 
open for worship by omitting the petitions for King George 
III and the royal family, while a few of the other Episcopal 
Churches in New England closed their doors rather than 
to stop praying for the rulers of the country which gave 
50 


them birth and the home of the Church that had nurtured 
them. 

After long struggles with bigotry and prejudices of one 
kind and another the Massachusetts Constitution was adopt- 
ed in 1780 to the end that this Commonwealth should be 
“ a government of laws and of men.” And that no man 
shall be disturbed for worshipping God according to his 
conscience, and in the eleventh amendment, that all relig- 
ious sects and denominations shall be equally under the 
protection of the law, and no subordination of any one sect 
or denomination to another shall ever be established. 

Immediately after the Boston Fire, Huntington Lecture 
Hall in the Lowell Institute, seating about one thousand 
persons, was engaged for Sunday services. The new Trin- 
ity Church in Copley Square was not finished for more 
than four years. The building of it brought out the fact 
that Phillips Brooks might have been a first class architect 
had he chosen that profession, and there are many of his 
own individual ideas embedded in the beautiful structure. 
He originated the motives that dominated the edifice, and 
he stimulated and supported the genius of the great arch- 
itect, Richardson. He possessed the complete confidence 
of the building committee and of the members of the par- 
ish, who manifested it by the unstinted generosity in re- 
sponding promptly to his increasing appeals for more and 
more money to glorify and beautify God’s House. He had 
a most extraordinary love of colorwhich Richardson satisfied 
by his proposal that Trinity Church should be made glorious 
by the richest effects of color that the best artists could 
produce. Mr. John La Farge had charge of it, with com- 
petent assistants, but his special work was confined to the 
inside roof and walls of the grand central tower. 

In February, 1877, the new Trinity Church was con- 
secrated, being the third building since the organization of 
Trinity parish, before A. D. 1 734. The architect charac- 
51 


terized the plan of the Church as “ a Latin cross with a 
semi-circular apse added to the eastern arm/* A free ren- 
dering of the French Romanesque of about the eleventh 
century. It has come to be looked upon widely as in a 
certain sense a memorial church to Phillips Brooks. This 
fact was recognized in the following words placed upon 
the records of the Church immediately after his death, and 
which were written by the late Mr. Robert C. Winthrop, 
referring to the hope expressed in Bishop Brooks' will that 
the front the church building might be speedily completed: 

“Whatever other monuments or memorials may be 
suggested or adopted, and for which there is abundant 
occasion and ample room, it is for the wardens and vestry 
and proprietors of Trinity Church to see to the immediate 
fulfillment of this hope of Bishop Brooks. The grand and 
massive building will then stand as his noblest and worth- 
iest monument, while his memory will be gratefully and 
affectionately cherished by those who have been associated 
in it with him, and by all who shall enter and occupy it 
in years which cannot be numbered/* 


52 


Chapter V 

THE BRITISH CHURCH • THE HOLY CATHOLIC 
CHURCH • GREAT CHURCHMEN 

I T should be remembered that “the English Church, from 
British days to our own, has been independent of, even 
when in full communion with the Roman See; in Galatian 
origin; in Gallican orders and liturgy; in the strong link 

TWICE FASTENED, THROUGH LYONS AND 
ARLES, WITH EPHESUS AND ST. JOHN, and 

in the striking facts that Ninian, her first missionary, and 
Aidan, the restorer of St. Augustine’s ruined work, and Ger- 
manus, the defender of the Faith against Pelagius, all came, 

with NO MISSION AND NO AUTHORITY 
FROM ROME. * * * Founded and flourishing in the 
very days when the Bishops of Rome claimed only local 
and suburbicarian jurisdiction, she was, like every ancient, 
independent Church, UNROMAN. At the time of her 
founding, Rome itself was virtually a Greek Church.” 
(“The Church in the British Isles,” Lecture by William C. 
Doane, pp. 24, 2 1 ). 

The great Lightfoot states that “the Christianity of Gaul 
was in some sense the daughter of the Christianity of Asia 
Minor. Of the history of the Gallican Churches before the 
middle of the second century we have no certain inform- 
ation. * * * The connection between the southern parts 
of Gaul and the western districts of Asia Minor had been 
intimate from the very remote times. Gaul was indebted 
for her earliest civilization to her Greek settlements like 
Marseilles, which had been colonized from Asia Minor 
some six centuries before the Christian era; and close rela- 
53 


tions appear to have been maintained even to the latest 
times. During the Roman period the people of Marseilles 
still spoke the Greek language familiarly along with the 
vernacular Celtic of the native population and the official 
Latin of the dominant power. When, therefore, Christian- 
ity had established her headquarters in Asia Minor, it was 
not unnatural that the Gospel should flow in the same 
channels which had already conducted the civilization and 
the commerce of the Asiatic Greeks westward. * * * 

“At any rate, whatever we may think of the antecedent 
probabilities the fact itself can hardly be disputed. In the 
year A. D. 177, under Marcus Aurelius, a severe perse- 
cution broke out on the banks of the Rhone in the cities 
of Vienne and Lyons — a persecution which by its extent 
and character bears a noble testimony to the vitality of the 
Churches in those places. To this incident we owe the 
earliest extant historical notice of Christianity in Gaul. A 
contemporary record of the martyrdoms on this occasion 
is preserved in the form of a letter from the persecuted 
Churches, addressed to ‘the brethren that are in Asia and 
Phrygia.’ The communities thus addressed, it will be ob- 
served, belong to the district in which St. John’s influence 
was predominant, and which produced all the writers of 
his school. * * * The very fact of their addressing the 
communication to those distant Churches shows the close- 
ness of the ties which connected the Christians in Gaul 
with their Asiatic brethren. * * * Among these martyrs 
the most conspicuous was Pothinus, the aged Bishop of 
Lyons, who was more than ninety years old when he 
suffered. * * * Whether an Asiatic Greek or not, he 
must have been a growing boy when St. John died; and 
through him the Churches of Southern Gaul, when they 
first appear in the full light of history, are linked with the 
Apostolic age.’’ (Lightfoot). 

It was the famous Irenaeus who became the second 
54 


Bishop of Lyons by succeeding Bishop Pothinus, who was 
martyred. Southern Gaul was “Greek and Oriental as much 
as Roman, and remained so till the Middle Ages ; a fact 
which we shall do well carefully to note for future refer- 
ence.” In Mr. Green’s “The Making of England,” the 
vast distinction is made between British Christianity and 
English Christianity. 

“The Christianity of the Angles and Saxons dates from 
Augustine, and was derived from Rome. British Christian- 
ity was the Christianity of the Britons; it existed here ages 
before Augustine, and must have been derived immediately 
from Gaul. This, if I am not mistaken, is far from being the 
ordinary view; people usually think that pagan darkness 
covered England and Ireland alike till St. Patrick came in 
the fifth century and converted Ireland, which enjoyed the 
light of the Gospel for a century and a half before England, 
where it did not penetrate till the beginning of the seventh 
century. Such, I say, is the ordinary view, due simply to 
ignorance of such an ordinary authority as ‘Bede’s History 
of the English Nation.’ During the first two centuries we 
have no certain records of any Christian effort in England. 
* * * More attention is due to the alleged conversion of 
some noble Britons at Rome about the time of Paul’s first 
visit. Tacitus tells us, in his Annals (XIII, 32), that Pompo- 
nia Graecina was the wife of Aulus Plautius, the first real 
conqueror of Britain, about the years 42-47 A. D. She 
was accused, about the year 5 7, of holding a ‘foreign super- 
stition,’ and was delivered over to the judgment of her hus- 
band, who very naturally acquitted her. The ‘foreign 
superstition’ had been identified with Christianity, and with 
good reason, as the excavations and investigations of De 
Rossi at Rome have proved.” (Lightfoot). 

“British Christianity does not, however, appear in history 
till the fourth century. The British Church is seen fully 
organized at the Synod of Arles, in A. D. 3 1 4, when three 
55 


Metropolitan bishops signed the acts of the Council-Ebo- 
rius, of York; Restititus, of London; and Adolfus, of Caer- 
leon-on-Usk, representing the three great centres of Roman 
life in Britain. The fourth century showed not merely the 
organization, it also proved the life and vigor of the British 
Church. * * * British bishops were probably present at 
Nice in 325, and at Sardicain 347. They were certainly 
present at the Arian Council at Arimium in 359, where 
the British bishops displayed their independence of impe- 
rial influence by refusing the public allowance for their 
maintenance.” 

“ The British Churches of the fourth century took the 
keenest interest in Church controversies. They opposed 
Arianism, but hesitated, like many others, about the use of 
the word. * * * The British Church, indeed, of this period 
proved its interest in theological questions by the most vig- 
orous and satisfactory of proofs. It produced a heretic. 
Pelagius, the founder of the Pelagian heresy, and the 
antagonist of Augustine, is said to have been a Welshman, 
whose British name was Morgan. By the close of the fourth 
century, Christianity must have prevailed universally among 
the British Celts. This is evident from the simple fact that 
the Celtic population which retired in the fifth and follow- 
ing centuries before the conquering Saxons were all of them 
Christians. In 4 1 1 Britain was conquered by the Saxons 
and Angles and cut off from the world, and again British 
Christianity owed its continued existence to a mission from 
Gaul, not Rome.” 

‘‘Christianity was probably brought into Britain between 
the years 1 76 and 208, for Irenaeus, writing in 176 of 
the number of Christian lands, does not mention Britain, 
while Tertullian, writing about 208, the year of the ex- 
pedition of Severus against the tribes of the North, says, 
somewhat rhetorically, that the Gospel had found its way 

into parts of BRITAIN WHICH WERE CLOSED 
56 


TO THE ROMANS. It doubtless came hither from 
Gaul, and its coming may well have been a result of the per- 
secutions which, in 177, fell upon the Christians of Lyons 
and Vienne and the country about them, for there are 
many traces of a close connection between the Churches 
of Gaul and Britain, and some indications of a special 
connection between Britain and the Churches of Lyons 
and Vienne.” 

** Ethelbert had been for thirty years king of Kent, and 
he had married Bertha, the daughter of a Frankish king, 
promising that she should be allowed the practice of her 

religion as a CHRISTIAN, her CHAPLAIN BEING 
THE FRANKISH BISHOP LIUDHARD. IT 
WAS AFTER EASTER IN THE YEAR 597 that 

missionaries landed on the isle of Thanet; and in the 
Ascension week, by permission of the King, they came to 
Canterbury. Outside the city stood the little church of St. 
Martin’s where St. Martin’s Church stands today, the 
Roman brick in its walls testifying to the great antiquity 
of a part at least of its structure, once the worshipping- 
place of a Christian congregation, then the chapel of a 
Christian queen. * * * Soon Ethelbert himself was bap- 
tized; and the conversion of Teutonic England began, 
just as Columbia, the great missionary of Celtic Britain, 
was breathing his last. Augustine brought with him, un- 
doubtedly, the belief which was growing more and more 
on the Italian Church in his time, that all bishops and 
Churches owed allegiance to the See of Rome; and he 
found stem and STEADY RESISTANCE ON THE 
PART OF THE BRITISH BISHOPS AND 
CHRISTIANS TO THIS CLAIM. That resistance 
lasted on and on, involving questions not ONLY OF 

KEEPING EASTER, BUT OF THE METHOD 
OF BAPTISM, AND THE WHOLE MATTER 
OF JURISDICTION.” (Quotations are from ‘‘Ireland 
57 


and the Celtic Church,” by Stokes; Bosworth, “Gothic 
and Anglo-Saxon Gospels,” preface; Samuel Hart, “ The 
Church in the British Isles ” ; Hunt, Introductory to his 
“ English Church.”). 

The earliest services of the Church of England held in 
this country were at Jamestown, Virginia, in May and June, 

1 607, by the Rev. Robert Hunt, chaplain to the company 
of “Gentlemen Adventurers” who settled Virginia. The 
Church of England was established by law in the colony. 
In 1672 a patent was prepared by Sir Orlando Bridge- 
men, under authority from King Charles II “ in council,” 
for a Bishop of Virginia, who was to exercise jurisdiction 
over all the colonies except New England. Drafts of the 
patent with blanks left for the name of the future bishop 
are in the archives of the Diocese of London and All Souls 
College, Oxford. It was intended that the Rev. Alexander 
Murray, a companion of the exiled King Charles, would 
have been named as bishop had not the rising tide of revolt 
against English oppression made it impossible for even the 
English Church to dictate any longer to the strong Amer- 
ican Church, and after the Revolution Virginia chose her 
own bishop. Thus the American Episcopal Church traces 
her descent from Christ and His Apostles through the 
“Church of England,” to which she has declared herself “in- 
debted, under God, for her first foundation and a long con- 
tinuance of nursing care and protection,” and from which, 
in the preface to her Book of Common Prayer, she had 
formally declared that she is “far from intending to depart 
in any essential point of doctrine, discipline or worship.” 

Is the Episcopal Church Protestant or Catholic ? “The 
Episcopal Church is both Protestant and Catholic. She is 
Catholic in that she is a living branch of the Church planted 
by Jesus Christ our Lord. She is Catholic in that she traces 
her lineage through the Church of England back to Christ 
and His Apostles, to the Church of the Living God, the 
58 


pillar and ground of the truth. She is Catholic in that she 
holds inviolate the Catholic creeds of the Church, the 
Apostles* Creed and the Nicene Creed, as based upon 
most certain warrants of Holy Scripture. She is Catholic in 
that she has maintained the historic ministry of the Church, 
the ministry of bishops, priests and deacons. And she is 
Catholic in that she holds forth and administers the sac- 
raments ordained by our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 
and the apostolic rite of Confirmation.’* 

“And she is Protestant in that she protests against error 
in doctrine and in life, whether the error be ancient or 
modern. She is Protestant because she believes in the 
sufficiency of Holy Scripture, so that whatever is not read 
therein, nor proved thereby, is not to be required of any 
man, that it should be believed as an article of faith or 
thought necessary to salvation. She is Protestant in that 
she holds it unlawful for the Church to ordain anything 
that is contrary to God’s Word written. She is Protestant 
in protesting against the defects and assumptions, doctrinal 
and organic, of Protestantism and the excesses and pre- 
sumptions, doctrinal and structured, of Romanism. She is 
Protestant as the Catholic Church of the first centuries was 
Protestant in protesting against the narrowness and exclu- 
siveness of Judaism and the error and evil of Paganism. 
But the Episcopal Church is equally the friend of the 
Romanist and the Protestant. She would give the hand 
of fellowship to all who love the Lord Jesus Christ, what- 
ever may be the banner under which they are fighting 
against the world, the flesh, and the devil; and she would 
unite them against the common enemy of God and man. 
So I end as I began: The Episcopal Church is both Pro- 
testant and Catholic; Catholic for every truth of God and 
Protestant against error of man.’’ (“ The Living Church” 
of April 8, 1 9 1 6, p. 8 1 6). 

The Episcopal Church in America has a “written Con- 
59 


stitution that is binding upon bishops, clergy and laity alike. 
The collective Episcopate of this Church has deliberately 
consented to that Constitution and to the enactment of 
canons under it, and each individual bishop has solemnly 
promised ‘conformity and obedience* to that body of law 
as chiefly constituting the ‘Discipline’ of the Protestant 
Episcopal Church. So though no doubt it is true that no 
authority is vested in the canons of the Church apart from 
the consent of the Episcopate,’ the Episcopate has given 
its consent to all the canons that this Church has ever 
enacted and each member of the Episcopate has promised 
obedience to them. * * * If the Anglican position taken 
at the Reformation had any permanent value at all it is 
that the ‘ authority of God touching matters spiritual ’ is 
vested in the collective Episcopate and not in a single 
bishop. * * * Let no one suppose we are taking a ‘low’ 
view of the Episcopate. Rather are we trying to clear 
away the obstructions which stand in the way of general 
acceptance of the historic Episcopate. We Churchmen 
must recognize and correct the abuses of Episcopal author- 
ity. It was this ‘prelatical’ view of episcopal functions 
which led to the total repudiation of all episcopacy by 
English nonconformity, and until we can purge our Epis- 
copate of it, we cannot disarm the objections that are 
raised to the system. * * * The opportunity to be pastor 
of his people is practically withdrawn from a bishop who 
deems himself, rather than the Church and the collective 
Episcopate, to be the law-maker for his diocese. (“Living 
Church’’ editorial, p. 9 1 0, April 29, 1916). 

At Jamestown, Virginia, in 1614, in the Episcopal 
Church, that is, the Church of England, Pocahontas was 
baptized and afterwards married to John Rolfe, and the 
Baptismal and Marriage services used were the same ser- 
vices, with a few verbal changes, that are used today in 
our Prayer Book. After the destruction of the first church 
60 


building, a second one was built on the same site, and in 
it the first free government upon this continent was set up 
in 1 6 1 9 at a meeting of the representatives of one thou- 
sand colonists chosen by universal suffrage, being the first 
Congress on American soil. This took place one year 
before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, thus representa- 
tive government, universal suffrage, and trial by jury were 
in full operation in America before the Pilgrims left their 
homes to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to find a place 
where they could enjoy religious and political liberty. A 
third and larger church was built of brick on Jamestown 
Island in 1 639, and its tower, now remaining, is the oldest 
piece of Christian masonry in the United States. 

In the early days the Episcopal Church was the nursery 
of American Independence, but it was also the Church 
home of the Loyalists and of the English Governors, and 
its rectors had been educated either at Oxford or Cam- 
bridge, so that to the rank and file of New England col- 
onists the Episcopal Church became identified with the 
King of England and Oppression. Yet it was from an 
Episcopal Church on Salem Street, Boston, commonly 
called by tourists “The Old North Church,” erected in 
1723, that two Episcopalians, Robert Newmen and John 
Pulling, hung out the famous lanterns which led to the first 
bloodshed of the American Revolution on Lexington 
Green. In another Episcopal Church (St. John’s), in Rich- 
mond, Virginia, Patrick Henry exclaimed dramatically: 
“Give me liberty or give me death!” 

There were five great founders of this Republic: Wash- 
ington, the father of his country; Madison, the father of 
the Constitution; Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration 
of Independence; and Hamilton, the real maker of the 
Government, its “political entity,” and of these five men 
all but Jefferson were Episcopalians. Of the fifty-six signers 
of the Declaration of Independence, thirty-six, or nearly two- 
61 


thirds, were Episcopalians, two of whom were Massachu" 
setts men. Twenty-seven signers of the Constitution of the 
United States were Episcopalians. This word is used with 
intention, as it is the custom nowadays for many Christians 
outside of the Episcopal Church to call themselves Church- 
men, a term they once scorned as much as they once de- 
rided and despised the term “Church,” preferring to call 
their places of worship “ Meeting-houses” for fear they 
might be accused of pro- Roman Catholicism. Nor is the 
term Holy Catholic Church used because it seems as if 
that great name should be finally applied exclusively to 
the whole Body of Christ when divided Christianity will 
have become one in Christ and then when the nine-tenths 
of all Christians in the whole world who will profess, as 
they do today, “ I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,” 
they will mean not only the invisible Body of Christ, but 
the visible organization of all believers in, followers of, and 
workers for Christ. 

Another Episcopalian, Richard Henry Lee, introduced 
the famous resolution in the Continental Congress that 
“these colonists are and of right ought to be, free and in- 
dependent states,” which was the first formal act of Amer- 
ican Independence. It was another member of the Epis- 
copal Church, Peyton Randolph, who presided over the 
first Continental Congress that drew up the Declaration 
of Rights, and the other documents which Lord Chatham 
declared were unsurpassed by any State papers ever com- 
posed in any age or country. The Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, written by Jefferson, was reported to the Con- 
tinental Congress by Benjamin Harrison, another Virginian 
Episcopalian. The first chaplain of the Continental Con- 
gress was Rev. Jaboc Duche, and the first chaplain of the 
United States Congress after Independence had been de- 
clared was the Rev. William White, both Churchmen, the 
latter afterwards becoming the first Bishop of the Episcopal 
62 


Church in Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin was baptized 
in the Episcopal Church, and it was he who revised the 
Prayer Book for his own use, leaving out all the glorifying 
of, and prayers for, the royal family of England, and in 
one of his well known letters Franklin urges his daughter 
to attend the Episcopal Church. The Constitution of the 
American Episcopal Church was drawn up in the same 
room, in the same Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 
which had been drawn up the Constitution of the United 
States, and they are very much alike in principle. 

Phillips Brooks delivered a wonderful sermon on the 
Prayer Book which he repeated on various occasions, 
and in which he said that the Prayer Book had the same 
power as the Bible to meet all ages and to adapt itself to 
all sorts and conditions of people, and to withstand all 
kinds of “Higher Criticism” because it contained great 
Christian principles of reverent religious worship and of 
communion between God and man, and that as other 
Churches began to appreciate even its literary value the 
Prayer Book would gradually claim their love and devo- 
tion as a grand product of the Christian ages. 

“To those ministers, laymen, and theological students 
who turned to Phillips Brooks with their doubts as to 
whether they had a right to remain in the Church, and 
who quoted the language of this or that churchman of the 
day, his unfailing answer was, ‘Why do you listen to 
him? No one man or group of men is the authoritative 
interpreter of the Church’s standards. Look to your Prayer 
Book, what do you find there ? Study it, interpret it by the 
history of the Church, and then and not till then make your 
decision.’ No churchman of his generation had a deeper, 
more intelligent, more loyal devotion to the Prayer Book 
than Phillips Brooks. It was to him as were the Scriptures, 
not a book of legal bondage, but of spiritual liberty.” 
(Bishop Lawrence, “A Study of PhillipsBrooks,”p.46,47.) 

63 


“ All the world’s history is ecclesiastical history, is the 
story of the success and failure, the advance and hinderance 
of the ideal humanity, the Church of the living God. * * * 
Among all the philosophies of history where is there one 
that matches with this simple story that man is the child 
of God, forever drawn to his Father, beaten back from 
Him by base waves of passion, sure to come to Him in 
the end. There is no philosophy of history which has 
been written like the Parable of the Prodigal Son.” (‘‘Light 
of the World and Other Sermons,” portions of pp. 16, 18, 
published by E. P. Dutton & Co., 1 890). 

‘‘Jesus Christ comes and preaches the Gospel of the 
Kingdom, and manifests the life of God. He stands with 
His shining nature upon the hill of the truth He has to 
preach. He is lifted up, by and by, in the fulness of 
His self-sacrifice upon His cross. Toward His light, soul 
after soul is drawn out of the darkness. Into the power of 
His self-sacrifice one life after another is summoned out 
of its discontent. It is all personal and individual at first. 
‘As many as receive Him to them gives He power to 
become the sons of God.’ It is this man and that man that is 
summoned. The light shines through this window and finds 
one laborer at his work. It smiles in through the smoke of 
some boisterous revel and fills some generous heart with 
shame. It smiles upon some dreamer and turns his dream 
into a purpose. It is all personal and individual. ‘Follow 
Me, follow Me,’ and Matthew leaves his tax-table stand- 
ing in the street; and the sons of Zebedee pull hastily in 
over the blue water to give themselves to the Master who 
has called them from the shore. And what comes next ? 
Why, the most natural thing in all the world — that which 
must always come when single men believe the same truth, 
or are driven on by the same impulse. When did a host of 
scholars ever sit at the same teacher’s feet and not become 
a school ? When did a host of separate soldiers go each 
64 


to fight the same enemy and not be drawn into an army? 
When were a multitude of atoms ever filled with one 
magnetism, and not brought into magnetic communion 
with each other ? All the individual believers in, and fol- 
lowers of, Christ, become one in their common loyalty and 
love. And so out of the crowd of disciples comes the 
Church. By and by a change approaches. The fountain 
out of which the Church life visibly has sprung, the Mas- 
ter who has called each of these disciples audibly to Him- 
self, is just about to vanish from their sight. He is to be 
still to each of them, and to each of those who shall come 
after them, the same which He has always been. Still, 
with His unseen presence, He is to give His separate 
summons to every soul. The unity of His believers to the 
end of time is still to have the secret of its existence in the 
personal relation between each of them and Him. To 
help this invisible relation to realize itself and not to be all 
lost in the unseen, the gracious kindness of the Master 
provides two symbols which thenceforth became the 
pledges at once of the personal believer’s belonging to the 
Lord, and of the belonging of believers to each other. 
The sacraments are set like gems to hold the Church into 
its precious unity. * * * We value and love our com- 
munion very deeply. * * * When we deliberately turn 
our backs for a moment upon all these rich and sweet asso- 
ciations, and ask ourselves in colder and more deliberate 
considerations, why it is that we believe in our Episcopal 
Church, and rejoice to commend her to our fellow-country- 
men and fellow-men; the answer which I find myself 
giving is that our Church seems to me to be truly trying 
to realize this relation to the whole world, this sacredness 
of all life, this belonging of all men to the Church of Christ, 
which, as I have been saying, is the great truth of active 
Christianity. I find the signs of such an effort in the very 
things for which some people fear or blame our Church. I 
65 


find it in the importance which she gives to Baptism and in 
the breadth of her conception of that rite; for Baptism is the 
strongest visible assertion of this truth. I find it in her sim- 
plicity of doctrine. I find it in the value which she sets on 
worship; her constant summons to all men not merely to 
be preached to, but to pray; her firm belief in the ability 
and right of all men to offer prayer to God. I find it in 
her strong historic spirit, her sense of union with the ages. 

* * * Her breadth of doctrine, her devoutness and her 
clear hold upon the long history of human life, all these 
qualify her for a great work in bringing up humanity, and 
making it know itself for what it is, the true universal 
Church of the Living God, toward which all ecclesiastical 
establishments which have thus far existed in the world, 
have been attempts, of which they have been preparatory 
studies. * * * My friends, it is not possible for the true 
man to r1 ink of his Church without thinking of his country. 

* * * We are glad indeed that our Church is not the 
only church which is labouring for the land’s (America’s) 
salvation. We rejoice in all that our brother Christians of 
other names are doing; but we believe in the work which 
our Church has to do. * * * Far, far away we see the 
Nation-church, the land all full of Christ, the Nation-church, 
a true part of the World-church, issuing into glorious life 
and swallowing up our small ecclesiasticisms, as the sun 
grandly climbing up the heavens swallows up the scattered 
rays which he sent out at his rising. And full of that vision, 
we are ready to do what we can to make our Church 
strong for the work which it must do in preparation for 
that day!” (‘‘Twenty Sermons,” portions of pp. 55, 56, 
59. E. P. Dutton & Co., 1886). 


66 


Chapter VI 

THE ORATOR • THE POINT OF CONTACT 
OR APPERCEPTION 

W HEN he preached to us he plunged into his subject 
as if it were a visible message from heaven, and he 
made it seem so tremendously vital and reasonable as he 
presented it, and at the same time so sublime, that we were 
entranced and then filled with the desire and will power to 
carry out immediately his comprehension of God’s will for 
us and life’s duties as they touched each one of us individ- 
ually. Such sublime and heavenly teaching seemejJ ordina- 
rily far beyond the reach of us every-day mortals' at if he 
said we could reach those heights why of course it must be 
true, and by God’s grace we would try to do it. What 
he preached and taught always had an authoritative and 
final stamp on it, like a deed of one’s house, and his great 
faith and inexhaustible enthusiasm carried us along so 
swiftly that when he stopped it seemed as if he had only 
just begun, and we almost rose en masse to our feet to beg 
him to go on forever. 

In all Mr. Brooks said the central thought was Christ 
crucified, “the hope of glory; whom we proclaim, admon- 
ishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom, 
that we may present every man perfect in Christ.’’ (Col- 
ossians 1 : 2 7, 28). In spite of the flying speed with which 
words and sentences followed each other from his lips, the 
clearness, like a cameo, of all his statements and wealth of 
descriptions, the keenness of presentation, and his marvel- 
ous apperception, not only getting in touch with every one 
of his listeners, but the gripping of their hearts literally 
67 


compelled us to grasp his message, dull of heart and brain 
as many of us were. His voice added greatly to his mes- 
sage, for it was a delight to the ear, so musical, sympathetic 
and tender, and had great carrying power and strength to 
penetrate our hearts and intellects. Yet no written words 
can convey to those who never heard him the uniqueness 
of this great Christian orator, nor can they understand the 
wealth of personality, the greatness, the simplicity, the sin- 
cerity of the man from his written words, but they can 
get his message, and after all that is the most important 
part of him, especially as in all his life one of the most 
impressive characteristics of Phillips Brooks was his power 
of turning one’s thought away from his own wonderful 
personality to Christ his Master, for he was a perfect med- 
ium through whom God’s message could be transmit- 
ted to mankind; a great witness to the power of the 
Gospel. 

At a meeting in honor of Robert Browning, in Boston, 
he was among the speakers, and each man bore testimony 
to the greatness of Browning as a poet and fellow-man; 
then came Mr. Brooks* turn to speak, and he called the 
attention of the critical audience immediately to the source, 
the spring of Browning’s greatness as a poet and man which 
was his faith in Jesus Christ, thus Phillips Brooks was 
always testifying to the power of Christ. 

He was so difficult to report that no two stenographers 
would have recognized their own notes as having been 
taken on the same occasion. Mr. Brooks was often annoyed 
and chagrined by the many false reports of what he had said. 
He could recognize his subject and a few words of his 
own here and there, but the rest would be a hodgepodge 
of what he really had said. 

The following quotation, cut from “ The Boston Tran- 
script,” voices the general feeling of thousands of persons 
who have been helped spiritually by Phillips Brooks. 

68 


“To the Editor of the ‘Transcript*: 

“ May I add a few words, though they are too feeble 
to convey my meaning, to what so many other friends 
have written, in efforts to describe the great man and dear 
friend whom we have lost. 

“ The grandeur, the simplicity, the loveliness of his char- 
acter have been spoken of exquisitely by his many friends. 
His fiery love of truth and his fearless courage all those 
who knew him felt profoundly. His hatred of dissimula- 
tion, his intense dislike of flattery and his mysterious mod- 
esty, his noble scorn of anything mean or miserly, his swift 
impatience to have any good purpose speedily accom- 
plished, all these and many other grand qualities were 
parts of his being. 

“ But Nature had endowed him more nobly, with men- 
tal faculties excelling those of most men, even as his gigan- 
tic stature towered among them all. 

“ Powers of imagination, so keen and brilliant that his 
descriptions of all the spiritual struggles of all sorts of diff- 
erent people, or of all our hopes of things in heaven, sur- 
passed in vividness the realities of other men. 

“ Sympathy, instant and unfailing, tender as a woman’s, 
added a yet more precious power to his preaching, and 
made his friendship or his consolation an unspeakable 
privilege. This part of his nature it was that made him 
delight in close contact with the life of great cities, or to 
speak to the common people who packed Faneuil Hall to 
listen to his words, and that took him down to the floor, 
when it was over, to press his hand with theirs. This it 
was that made him an inspiration to every charitable move- 
ment of our time; so that no meeting of a Young Men’s 
Christian Union or Association, or Kindergarten for the 
Blind, or Associated Charities, or Workingmen’s Institute, 
and so on through the list, was complete unless Phillips 
Brooks was there to pour out the grandest thoughts about 
69 


the work in hand in inspired exhortation, even if only in a 
few minutes, to close with at least some words of mighty 
benediction, to send the workers bounding forward and 
upward in their work. No wonder that the charitable 
energies of Boston have been nobly directed. Long may 
the powers working to make our city purer and happier 
be guided by his spirit of wisdom and of love. Long may 
his passionate appeals for foreign missions, for the slave, 
the Chinese, the blind or the sick or any form of suffering, 
ring in our ears and be passed on from soul to soul. 

“What man can we think of whose love for every 
varying need, for the whole brotherhood of mankind, has 
been so warm, so quick, so wide, so noble ! 

“ I name these qualities of superb intellect, brilliant im- 
agination, tenderest sympathy in the ascending order of 
their excellence as I felt their force. 

“ But the culminating glory of his nature, that wherein 
lay the secret of his transcendent power as a preacher, 
surpassing all other men of our times was this — that on 
the side toward God the fleshly wall of partition was so 
thin that his soul looked right through into heaven and saw 
his Heavenly Father and felt His love and the love of Jesus 
in the midst of the great communion of saints. All this in 
marvelous degree was so near and real to him that he 
preached it with divine force, filled with inspiration and 
radiant with the love of our Great Brother, as he delighted 
to call our Saviour. 

“ Who can forget, that ever heard, towards the close of 
some afternoon extempore address, his soul pour itself out 
in a vision of what heaven was to be ? These were the 
times when the glory of his preaching culminated. Instruc- 
tion, exhortation, appeal, were over. His soul seemed to 
look into heaven and see our Saviour welcoming us to a 
Father’s love and to the happy company of the holy men 
of all ages, rejoicing in the glories of immortal life. In words 
70 


blazing with fire or melted in exquisite tenderness or radiant 
with hope and changing quickly from one emotion to an- 
other, often with his head thrown back and eyes on high 
as piercing through the veil, his great figure would rise and 
dilate to its utmost majesty, as he threw his arms wide 
open with that mighty gesture of loving invitation, and then 
his face would melt into that angel smile of tenderness, 
never seen by some of us on any other mortal face, and 
gathering the whole energies of his kingly being into some 
supreme vision, he swept his vast audience with his mighty 
inspiration through the open gates of heaven into the vis- 
ible presence of God. 

“ Here was the power which, illuminating all his other 
grand qualities, made him the greatest preacher of our 
times, and forced him, all unconscious of himself, to pour 
out his life in unceasing devotion to every need of man, 
himself the noblest man of this generation.” (Signed by 
Mr. Robert Treat Paine, and dated January 29, 1893). 

The following editorial, cut from “The Boston Tran- 
script ” of November 20, 1915, twenty-three years later, 
shows that the deep impression Phillips Brooks made was 
still a living memory to newspaper men, who themselves 
have a far-reaching influence upon mankind: 

“ Phillips Brooks was one of the most majestic, the most 
personally impressive and the most vital man that ever lived. 
Nature endowed him with titanic proportions, and these 
proportions he seemed to increase when his words poured 
forth in swift and vivid utterance. * * * His eminence 
in this city and this country, his intimate association with 
Boston through birth, inheritance and education, his long 
connection with Trinity Church, his brilliantly achieved 
episcopate, in which he came as nearly as any man could 
to being the shepherd of all, richly entitle his name to the 
highest memorial honors.” 

A less great sculptor could have given a portrait of 


Phillips Brooks in bronze, but only a great genius could 
grasp and give to the world that through which the world 
could realize at a glance the character of great personality 
and what he stood for in the community and in the world. 
St. Gaudens tried at first to separate Christ and His Cross 
from Phillips Brooks by conceiving that an angel figure 
floating round or angels near him would render complete 
what Phillips Brooks stood for, but after reading his ser- 
mons the sculptor was compelled by his love of truth, hon- 
esty and beauty to show to the world that the Christ was 
dead and yet alive for evermore, and from everlasting had 
filled the whole life of Phillips Brooks. And this wonder- 
ful memorial by St. Gaudens was presented by the CITI- 
ZENS OF BOSTON TO TRINITY CHURCH 
on January 22, 1910. 


72 


Chapter VII 

THE MAKING OF CHARACTER • UNITARIAN ISM 
MIRACLES • MOTHER’S JUDGMENT 

I N 1 8 7 7 he delivered his “ Lectures on Preaching,** and 
in 1879 he gave his lectures entitled “The Influence 
of Jesus,” both of which are largely autobiographical, and 
have since become manuals for the clergy and theological 
students of the Christian world. As literature they connect 
the pulpit with real, vital, Spirit-quickening life. Although 
in “The Influence of Jesus** Mr. Brooks is more imper- 
sonal than in the other book, still it is a wonderful revela- 
tion of Phillips Brooks himself. 

He officiated on many memorable occasions in the his- 
tory of Boston, but he drew a sharp line between religious 
and civic sermons, and he allowed nothing to interfere 
with his profession of teaching the Christian religion, not 
even the most tempting offers, such as to make himself at 
home in the pages of the “Atlantic Monthly.” Without 
identifying himself with any special cause outside his life 
work he gave his support and encouragement to those 
philanthropic societies which secured the greatest good to 
humanity. Among all these activities his heart went out to 
the cause of the children and young people. The colleges 
claimed his attention also, and he took a Bible class in Har- 
vard; he also preached in Appleton Chapel regularly after 
1873. Asa member of the State Board of Education he 
visited annually the normal schools of Massachusetts and 
preached many times in the various colleges, for he consid- 
ered that the question of education was a vital problem for 
the pulpit because its aim was the making of character. He 
73 


gave himself whole-heartedly and completely to every 
cause he championed. 

He loved man vastly more than he loved nature ; he loved 
the city much more than the country, for he knew that 
nature was made for man, and that mankind was not made 
for nature. However beautiful and wondrous were the 
visible heavens and earth and all the great planets and stars, 
and the depths of the oceans, MAN was the Crown of all, 
so that to him a view of nothing but chimney pots was 
vastly superior, nay, more beautiful than a glorious view 
anywhere of mountains, ocean or valley, because the 
chimney pots represented MAN for whom Christ died. 

Some people thought that he preached, lectured and 
talked by a kind of intuition and without preparation, and 
some even thought he knew nothing of modem Biblical 
criticism because he never mentioned certain current, prom- 
inent writers in his public utterances, but made the Truth 
so plain that we were all impressed by it. For all his work, 
as has already been said, he made enormous preparation, 
studying hard and wide. His Note books and Outlines re- 
vealed how prodigious a student he was of all ancient and 
modem scholarship. Dr. Allen gives a list of some of the 
44 Higher Critics ” with whom Mr. Brooks was as familiar 
as a thorough knowledge of the foreign languages in which 
most of them were written could make him, and he owned 
many of their books in his own library in Boston. In his 
frequent visits to England and to Europe he chose visiting 
particularly the University towns. The years of the seven- 
ties were alive with materialism, fatalism, pessimism and 
agnosticism, and with vigorous denunciations of dogmas 
and Church doctrines and allegiance, and the denunciators 
never hesitated to use an untruth, or a half truth to make 
their point, and as for ridicule they heaped it up so high 
that it became ridiculously funny and missed fire. In Bos- 
ton one could find a sample of most any of the “ isms ” 
74 


known to exist in the world, so in his Wednesday evening 
lectures Phillips Brooks discussed, among other things, re- 
ligious theories and theological opinions by proving and 
emphasizing the TRUTH. 

The Unitarians complained “that he assumed that as 
sinners we must not only repent, but rely upon Christ’s 
atoning blood.” (Allen, II, p. 1 20). 

His lectures on the life of Christ were deep and inex- 
haustible in their variety. He also took up every part of 
the Prayer Book, giving us wonderful, illuminating insight 
on most every sentence in it, taking them in groups. Another 
year his lectures would be on the history of the Church, 
and again on the history of the Bible. The Psalms seemed 
written by living men after he taught us about them. He 
believed in teaching children the Church Catechism, for 
he had been thoroughly trained by his mother in its teach- 
ing, beginning when he was four years old, and “when he 
came to years of discretion he ratified his MOTHER’S 
JUDGMENT, and in his manhood rejoiced in his lot 
among the churches.” (Allen, II, p. 5 1 4). 

Mr. Brooks never thought of the world as swinging in 
empty space, but full of unseen forces. In his sermon en- 
titled “Unseen Spiritual Helpers” he says he hoped that 
“we shall see a great restoral of healthy belief in spiritual 
presences.” In another sermon he says: “A thousand things 
seem dreamlike to the great majority of men which by and 
by are going to be known as great moving powers of the 
world.” (Volume VI, p. 79, “The Mystery of Iniquity” 
sermon). 

When he preached at Oxford in 1885 he was pre- 
sented to the audience “ as a defender of the Catholic 
faith.” He was always in great demand when he visited 
England, preaching at the University of Cambridge also, 
and in Westminster Abbey, and he was the first American 
deemed worthy to be invited to preach before the Qyeen. 
75 


When asked if he did not dread it, he replied, “Why 
should I, I have often preached before my mother.” He 
would have been killed by English kindness if he had 
accepted one tenth of the invitations which poured in on 
him. Among the few invitations he did accept was one to 
see Tennyson in his own home. He thoroughly enjoyed 
meeting Gladstone, Browning, Jean Ingelow, Matthew 
Arnold, Burns-Jones, William Morris and many more of 
England’s celebrities. 

Mr. Brooks seldom talked of his friends abroad, except 
of Dean Stanley, Tennyson and Browning. He felt a kin- 
dred spirit in Robert Browning, for, like himself, Brown- 
ing had a talent for nonsense, was gay and amusing in 
society, and never alluded to the serious problems of life 
nor took the social public into his confidence, but reserved 
all the deep problems of life for his books. Both Browning 
and Brooks, who taught the deepest things that the soul of 
man is capable of receiving, erected a barrier between 
their souls and the prying eyes of the public by their talent 
for nonsense in little things. Mr. Brooks* naturally deep 
reserve was intensified by the daily tributes of admira- 
tion, and even adulation, which he received. Sometimes 
he would sit through a dinner without saying more than 
a word or two, but generally he was the life of the 
party. 

The Rev. Leighton Parks once asked Phillips Brooks 
if he thought the claim of Unitarianism that it was leading 
religious thought and that liberal theology was on its way 
to Unitarianism had any truth in it. He answered: “The 
spray that is cast on the shore may claim that it is dragging 
the ocean after it, but we know that it is only the effect 
of a mighty movement, which it does not understand.’* 
(“The Theology of Phillips Brooks,” by Dr. Parks. Pub- 
lished in 1 894 by Damrell and Upham). 

To a letter from Rev. C. A. L. Richards, asking in 
76 


regard to a current report that Mr. Brooks had surrendered 
his faith in the miracle, he wrote: 

“Boston, March 22, 1884. 

“ What a curious question! No, I have not ‘surrendered 
the miraculous element in the New Testament,’ nor do I 
‘ believe Jesus the natural son of Joseph and Mary,* nor 
do I ‘think Stopford Brooke needlessly withdrew from the 
Church of England,* and points like these. Who on earth 
can be the man who cares what I think about these things.’’ 

Another letter written by Mr. Brooks and quoted by 
Mr. Allen on the same page, is as follows: 

“ Dear Mrs. Mercer: 

“ I must thank you in a single hurried word for your 
kindness in sending me the account of Stopford Brooke’s 
sermon. I differ from him very deeply. To me the Incar- 
nation and the miracles which Christ Jesus is said to have 
wrought seem sublimely reasonable and contradicted by 
no knowledge of man or of the world which God has 
given us. I believe that they are true historically and most 
natural philosophically.’* (Allen. II, p. 548). 

“ He is recalled at this time as once entering his study, 
where friends were waiting for him, throwing his hat across 
the room indignantly, and refusing to talk. It appeared 
that he had just come from a conversation on the street 
with a clergyman of another denomination, who quietly 
ASSUMED that he did not believe the creeds he was 
in the habit of reciting. He had broken out in moral wrath 
against the man and against his assumption, asking him if 
he realized the meaning of what he was saying. To a 
clergyman who had published a statement to the effect 
that Mr. Brooks no longer believed in the tenets of his 
creed, he wrote an emphatic letter, saying plainly that the 
statement was untrue. This difficulty which he encountered 
might afford opportunity for a curious psychological study. 
People wanted him to believe as they did. It shook their 
77 


faith in their own position if it were shown that he did not. 
Hence they ASSUMED the agreement. They were un- 
willing to accept his denial. They apologized for him on 
the ground that he could not know himself on such points.” 
(Allen, II, p.548). 

At this time Mr. Brooks was forty-eight years old, and 
he lived to be fifty-seven, so he could not be accused of 
being too young to know his own mind. Most of the Uni- 
tarians whom the writer has met within the past ten years 
take another tack and say that “ he would have been a 
Unitarian if he had lived longer.” Which is like the English 
mother of the boy whose father was an American, and 
who tried to explain to her son one evening when he was 
studying his American history lesson, to be recited the next 
day in one of our Public Grammar Schools, that the Eng- 
lish would have won in the Revolutionary Period and in 
1 8 1 2 if so and so had happened. “But, mother,” objected 
her son, “what might have been is not history.” 

“The doctrine of the Trinity is a protest against the 
hard, tight personalness of the conception of God, * * * 
and an attempt to give richness, variety, mystery, internal 
relation, abundance, and freedom to the ideas of God. 
Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and indi- 
vidual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meager 
Deity.” (From an Essay given at the Clericus Club, April 
5, 1 886, and published in the book entitled “Essays and 
Addresses by Phillips Brooks,” page 1 5 7). 


78 


Chapter VIII 

THE DEATH OF FATHER AND MOTHER • THE 
RINGING OF THE RECTORY BELL 

W HEN Mr. Brooks returned from his vacation abroad 
in September, 1 877, he set up housekeeping at 1 75 
Marlborough Street, and he was dreadfully disappointed 
to find that his parents refused to live with him; or in fact 
with any of the Brooks boys. His mother refused any such 
invitation on principle, and had left Boston to pass her 
remaining years in the old homestead in North Andover. 

The General Convention was held in Boston in Octo- 
ber, but Mr. Brooks was unable to attend because he had 
“slow fever,” and found some difficulty in walking. In the 
following spring, for the season of Lent, he asked the 
Proprietors of Trinity Church for permission to hold Sun- 
day evening services with all seats free, and the Church 
was literally packed full of people; in fact as many as 
could be crowded in attended all three Sunday services, 
and he preached almost always; and at the Morning Ser- 
vice his custom was to read a written sermon. This was 
also the custom of Canon Liddon, England’s greatest 
preacher. Mr. Brooks put his soul into the Daily Lenten 
Services, which were inaugurated in 1882 in Trinity 
Church, but used earlier in many other Episcopal Churches, 
and today increasingly used by the Denominations. 

During the summer of 1878 his father and mother 
visited Mr. Brooks at Hingham,and his tenderness, thought- 
fulness and utter devotion were beautiful to witness, but 
the climate did not agree with his father, so his parents 
returned to the dryer, softer air of North Andover. Grad- 
79 


ually the illness of his father became more serious, till his body 
and mind failed, and his spirit fled on January 7, 1879. 

Mr. Brooks felt the death of his father keenly, for it 
seemed to him as if his father had been more of the ideal 
father than any other boys had ever had, for his life had 
been a happy, healthy, true, manly Christian life for boys 
to witness daily, and he had spread around them an atmos- 
phere in which it was possible for his children’s religious 
life to grow and expand. In the “Influence of Jesus’* 
Phillips Brooks has written about the true relationship 
between father and son in this world and in the next, and of 
how the “earthly kinships are the symbol of the heavenly 
reality.’* 

The dearest mother in all the world only survived her 
husband a few days longer than a year, passing to her 
happiness on February 1, 1880. Dr. Brooks’ grief was 
vastly greater and deeper for his mother than for his father, 
for his life and happiness had revolved around his mother; 
she had been the hub of his universe, and all his life he 
had dreaded the loss of her. He now felt an awful cavity 
in his heart and daily life, and he thought of so many 
things about which his first thought was, how would his 
mother think about it, and what would she say, and so 
many times just her silences were full of golden sympathy. 
What a joy it would be to see her once more, and this 
time forever in the everlasting life. He went over and over 
again, as we all do when deep grief grips us, his life with 
his mother; he went way back to the beginning when he 
was first consciously open to her influence and fathomless 
love. Both his father and mother illustrated the beauty of 
death, the fusing of this life into the life beyond, “the new 
life which she had begun seems only the continuation and 
fulfilment of the life on earth which we know and loved 
so well,’’ he wrote to a friend. In one of his sermons he 
speaks beautifully and practically of how we can keep the 
80 


purity, color and glory of family life today. He reminds 
us of how Christ “ bids His disciples make way for the 
MOTHERS bringing HIM THEIR CHILDREN; 
so He finds in household life an image of the everlasting 
Father’s willingness to hear His people’s prayer.” 

Mr. Brooks had looked forward to being married as a 
completer earthly life, and among his early verses are some 
exquisite love poems. After his mother’s death he became 
intensely lonely at times, as the unsatisfied home instinct 
grew deeper with advancing years, especially in the even- 
ing when he returned after some engagement and found 
no friend there to welcome him or who needed him. The 
popular reverence for him kept many of his friends away, 
for they thought they had no right to take up too much 
of his valuable time, and it created an atmosphere in which 
he seemed to live apart from ordinary men in spite of 
everything he could do or say to prevent it, and this 
increased his feeling of loneliness. Yet the popular faith 
in his power to heal and to help was drawn upon with- 
out the slightest hesitation by all sorts and conditions of 
people, rich and poor alike, whether they knew him or 
not, whether they had ever even heard him preach or 
speak in public or not. They simply turned to him as 
naturally as the flowers turn to the sun, in any crisis in their 
lives of which they could see no solution, or which seemed 
to be too heavy a burden to be borne; the thought of one 
and all being: We ’ll ask Phillips Brooks, he ’ll know what 
to do and he ’ll help us. People of all faiths and of no 
faith never failed to find him ready and happy to help 
them, utterly regardless of his own health, time and strength 
which were being drained so constantly and continuously. 
Friends who visited him for several weeks at a time in the 
rectory were astonished at the constant ringing of the door 
bell, which averaged once in every five minutes. They 
remonstrated with him and begged him to have stated 
81 


times to see people or to see them by appointment, but 
he steadfastly refused, saying that the people came to see 
him personally and that perhaps the hours which would 
be convenient for him would not suit them at all, besides 
when people were in trouble they were not likely to be 
thinking of convenient times and seasons for getting advice, 
comfort and help, but needed it at that moment when 
they sought it or they would not come; another time 
might be too late, not the psychological moment when he 
could help them the best and the quickest out of their 
trouble, or to bear their trials. He never hesitated to keep 
his friends waiting to see him at the rectory, even by 
special appointment, if some poor colored man or woman 
needed him in the hospital, or some sick woman or child 
needed him, or there was an unexpected call for the ad- 
ministration of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper for 
any parisioner unable to attend the Service in the Church. 

A working man and his wife called one evening because 
the next day the man must have an operation performed, 
and he needed spiritual help to carry him through the 
ordeal; though neither the man nor his wife knew Mr. 
Brooks, or had the faintest claim upon him, they were 
received and comforted and the next day Mr. Brooks 
remained at the hospital during the operation. There are 
thousands of persons who could testify to the personal 
help, not money, which Mr. Brooks gave them without 
stint or measure, half of whom were not members of Trinity 
parish. To be sure, such incidents are common, every-day 
occurences in an active Christian ministry, yet the point is 
this, that “ the people ” claimed Phillips Brooks as their 
very own, as if he belonged to them alone, he, the greatest 
man of his generation, he, whose presence on any occasion 
meant its success, he, the marvelous preacher, the scholar, 
the leading citizen, whose friendship was the brightest jewel 
of one’s life, had time to devote to “the people” who had 
82 


no personal claim upon him except they were God’s chil- 
dren. His wonderful gift of consolation grew by using it 
constantly, and of course some of those rings every five 
minutes on the door bell of the rectory were in connection 
with his parish. When members of his parish were sick 
he went to see them regularly once a week, sometimes 
two and three times, till they were either well or dead, no 
matter how many years either ending might require. 

He had the gift of making his dwelling-place homelike 
no matter where he lived. Signs of shiftlessness annoyed 
him, and his house was scrupulously neat and in perfect 
order. He gave his orders for its management and for the 
daily meals every morning, and he knew exactly what he 
wanted. He was very careful to answer all his letters 
promptly. He had his mother’s bed altered to fit his pro- 
portions and used it ever afterwards. Upon one occasion 
when the Bishop was to address the clergy in St. Paul’s 
Church, he took his mother’s Prayer Book with him and 
used it, sitting in the pew which the Brooks family sat in 
while attending St. Paul’s Church. At another time he 
preached in St. Paul’s Church and he had the same curious 
sensations that he always had when he had occasion to 
preach there, as if he was the very tall boy over in pew 
60 and the preaching minister at the same time. 

In those days Trinity Church was institutional, for it 
carried on numberless activities outside of the usual work 
of a parish, and Mr. Brooks showed remarkable adminis- 
trative abilities, and it is “ the testimony of Bishop Law- 
rence, than whom no one is more competent to speak, 
that Phillips Brooks excelled in executive ability. * * * 
A business man in Philadelphia, one of his former parish- 
ioners, had said of him that he was capable of taking charge 
of the largest business corporation in the country, and that 
if he gave his mind to such work he could not be excelled 
in efficiency.” (Allen, II, p. 887). 

83 


Our Industrial, Employment and Visiting Societies 
worked for the poor, and have been working for more 
than half a century. The Indian Association elided in 
righting the wrongs of the Indians of America. The Zen- 
ana Mission supported a missionary in Calcutta, and the 
Zenana Band was specially interested in the women of 
India. Trinity Club was a social organization of the young 
men of the parish who were expected to exercise a friendly 
and religious influence upon the community. The Parish 
Library had wielded an influence for good for many years. 
The Rachel Allen Memorial for aged women of the 
parish, who had no one who could give them a home, but 
who might pay something for their support in a comfortable 
home. The Girls’ Friendly Society stood for purity of life 
among young girls, and for general usefulness. Trinity 
House, including Burroughs Place and elsewhere, did 
enormous good in its Day Nursery, Employment Bureau 
and Laundry, and in its many Industrial classes for women 
and children, which stood for education in the duties and 
principles of home life, and included gardening. 

Our Bible Classes were well known for their faithful 
study of the Bible and kindred subjects, and for their 
splendid work for Missions. Groups of women contributed 
largely to the work of the Massachusetts Branch of the 
Woman’s Auxiliary, besides all that the men gave to all 
kinds of work, making the contribution of Trinity parish to 
the various activities of the whole Church a very important 
step towards the hastening of the coming of the Kingdom 
of God on this earth. 

There was also the St. Andrew Mission to be supported 
with money, time and strength. The present writer and 
her brother were active little workers in its predecessor on 
Charles Street, near the “Jail.” It was then called St. John 
the Evangelist, and changed to St. Andrew when it moved 
into its spacious quarters on Chambers Street. In addition 
84 


to the societies of a similar nature, like the Industrial Classes 
mentioned above, there were two unique charities con- 
nected with St. Andrew Mission, the Vincent Memorial 
Hospital and the Trinity Dispensary. In the latter four 
physicians gave their advice free, and the medicine sold 
at the lowest possible price. The Vincent Memorial Hos- 
pital has always done first class work, and rejoiced to 
extend its usefulness when it was able to move into its 
commodious quarters near its sister hospitals. 

Mr. Brooks was intensely interested in the Sunday 
Schools of Trinity and St. Andrew, though he allowed our 
assistant ministers to instruct his teachers in an extra Bible 
Class. His own teaching being reserved for Wednesday 
evenings and during Lents. Every boy and girl in Trinity felt 
he was their own particular friend and rector, for he seemed 
to know every one of them, and that was a great draft on 
his memory, for our Sunday Schools were very large. In 
the building of Trinity Church Mr. Brooks had stipulated 
that the north gallery should be reserved for the Sunday 
School children whose parents did not own a pew, so they 
would not get the idea that the Sunday School was the 
Children’s Church, nor would they have any excuse for 
being rude to God by being late to the services in God’s 
own House. When some of the teachers gave annual 
dinners or suppers to the members of their Sunday School 
classes Dr. Brooks loved to attend them, and felt quite 
hurt if his teachers thought he was too busy to be invited. 

Ministers of all denominations, and parents, wrote to 
him to look after the welfare of their boys and girls who 
were in Boston or its vicinity to study. His pastoral acti- 
vity and influence were extended to the higher institutions 
of learning. Yale University was the first to claim him for 
an address to the students. Cornell, Harvard, Williams, 
Princeton, Lee University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, and 
others asked his presence to influence the young men. 

85 


To the Institute of Technology he almost seemed to have 
an official relationship, so close and so deep did he cherish 
it. For Groton School he wrote the School Hymn, and 
the boys claimed him as their very own. He told the 
Harvard boys that “the ministry was the noblest and most 
glorious calling to which a man can give himself.” (Allen, 

II, p.802). 

A Boston newspaper recorded as an item of news: “It 
was a rainy day when things looked dark and lowering, 
but Phillips Brooks came down Newspaper Row and all 
was right.” Hundreds of such sayings were current and 
household words. His photograph was in many homes all 
over this country; one would find them in the most unex- 
pected places. For instance, a gentleman and his wife 
visited Saratoga Springs for the first time, and upon arriv- 
ing took a carriage and asked to be driven to a certain 
small hotel which had been highly recommended by Bos- 
ton friends. Instead of taking them to the place specified 
the driver took them to another house and announced that 
it was the hotel asked for. As there was no outside name 
and the couple were unsupicious, they alighted and went 
in and were given a pleasant room, in which was the usual 
card telling about the number of bell rings, and on it was 
the name of the hotel. The gentleman turned in wrath, 
ready to descend to the office and to slay the proprietor 
with words for being apparently in collusion with the 
carriage drivers to deceive the unwary, when his eyes fell 
upon a good picture of Phillips Brooks, and that settled it; he 
accepted his defeat gracefully, for he said the “ hotel must 
be all right or it would not have his picture on its walls.” 

The saying of Phillips Brooks that “ he was not good 
enough when on his vacation to do without going twice to 
Church on Sundays” influenced many a stay-at-home to try 
to go at least once on Sundays to Church, and not to leave 
their religion behind them in summer, or during vacations. 

86 


Chapter IX 

THE DECISION OF THE PEOPLE • THE BISHOP 
“FOREVER WITH THE LORD " 



'HE call to Harvard to be the Professor of Christian 


X Ethics made a tremendous stir in Boston, regardless of 
creed, race or color. The rich and the poor, the slums and 
the Back Bay united in keeping Phillips Brooks rector of 
Trinity Church in the spring of 1881, and he found to his 
great amazement that he was not to decide for himself, 
but the people were to do it for him, and they did. 
From all parts of the country, also from all classes of people, 
he received hundreds and hundreds of letters, and only 
one out of every eleven wanted him to accept the pro- 
fessorship at Harvard. And yet in going to Harvard he 
would have escaped the glare and turmoil of the popular- 
ity, and adulation sometimes, which he hated, and he might 
have given to the world some wonderful books on Chris- 
tian Ethics, because he would have had the time to have 
written them. 

Scholars, statesmen, thinkers, lawyers, physicians, busi- 
ness men, masters of all trades and masters of none, closest 
friends and total strangers united, like the voice of the people 
on presidential election days, to prevent Phillips Brooks from 
leaving Trinity. They poured out their very hearts to him 
and to the newspapers, it was, in fact, a deep soul-full 
eulogy because the love for, and devotion to, Phillips 
Brooks rested on sure and eternal foundations, for he was 
the deliverer raised up and trained by God to defend the 
Faith against those destroyers who came in sheep’s clo- 
thing but were inwardly ravening wolves. Christ said 


87 


there “shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and they 
shall show signs and wonders that they may lead astray, 
if possible, the elect. But take ye heed; behold, I have 
told you all things beforehand.” (Mark 13:22,23). 
And they have not God’s Word abiding in them, and 
they believe not Christ, yet they search the Scriptures that 
bear witness of Christ and His redemptive work, and had 
they believed Moses they would have believed Christ, 
for he wrote of Christ, but if they believed not Moses’ 
writing how shall they believe Christ’s words. (St. John 

5:38,46,47). 

Bishop Lawrence, in his short“Study of Phillips Brooks,” 
states the experience of thousands when he wrote: “The 
climax of his powers, the finest illustration of his lifelong 
character — that of turning men from himself to Christ, 
from the preacher to the Master. During his life he re- 
ceived such adulation as has been the lot of few men; 
and since his death he has been held in tender memory 
by thousands. His name is still heard in the homes, the 
colleges, the jails, and hospitals, but whenever his name is 
spoken, whenever his figure comes to memory, there is 
always in the background, uplifted, dominant and liv- 
ing, the form and spirit of his Master , Christ, the eye 
and thought instinctively turn from one to the other. ” 
(Page 50). 

In his Lenten Services for 1 8 8 8 he preached Christ so 
emphatically and stressed His presence in us and His 
power over all our lives so deeply that it seemed to us as 
if Mr. Brooks were delivering a spoken message from a 
visible Christ to us. On Wednesday evenings he spoke 
of Christ in the social life of the day, what we now call 
Social Christianity, and its practical methods in social ser- 
vice, and on Friday afternoons he taught us again about 
the Litany. In his Saturday evening Bible Class for men 
he had studied the Psalms and had proved how only a 
88 


great personality could have expressed such deep and 
wonderful experiences of the soul as are found in the 
Psalms of David, which added to the history of David’s 
life show him to have been one of the world’s greatest 
men. 

We see how naturally Phillips Brooks took his place 
in the long line of great bishops who have given their lives 
to Christ and his Church, even his enemies admitted it after 
his death, All great men, nay, even men and women of 
any strong Christian character have enemies, unless there 
is something wrong with their religion, for active Christian- 
ity makes enemies as it interferes with the unholy profits 
of those who have not thought of anyone but themselves, 
and the same is true in the region of the mind, for “there 
are always those who are not conscious of the Church’s 
historic comprehension of different types of thought.** 

Bishop Brooks set a killing pace of work, for when he 
became Bishop of Massachusetts he still had us of Trinity 
on his hands and heart, and was called by those who 
were sick or in trouble or in joy, such as being married, 
for naturally the rector who had seen them grow up was 
wanted to officiate at the weddings. The rectory where 
he still lived was open more than ever to the whole of 
Massachusetts as a matter of course, and to whomsoever 
from other States wanted to apply. And the clergy poured 
into his sympathetic ears and helpful heart all their troubles 
and difficulties as never before. Candidates for the min- 
istry were disappointed to find him such a very rigid can- 
onist, especially those from the denominations who had 
misunderstood his attitude toward the Church of God, and 
had assumed an easy entrance into the American Episco- 
pal Church. He believed in government by both Church 
and State, and in carrying out not only the letter of the 
law but its spirit. 

During the first eight months of being bishop he made 
89 


a “ larger number of visitations than any other bishop in 
the American Church, or I believe in Christian history, 
ever did in the same length of time. Through the pressure 
of friends he had a stenographer, but ha could not bring 
himself to close his door from early morning to late night 
to anybody, and the stream continued throughout the day. 
* * * He was ready to do the preaching and make the 
visitations (Confirmations), but the social pressure, and the 
pressure of unnecessary duties and unreasonable people, 
wore him out. I have said, and I believe, that it would 
have been almost impossible for him radically to change 
his methods and system. It was part of his nature to see 
everybody who wanted to see him and to help everybody 
who wanted help. Without that radical change, he must 
have gone under in a few years, as he did at the end of 
fifteen months.” (Bishop Lawrence). 

In “The Boston Transcript” for January 27, 1893, 
pages 8 and 9, are the following words in a letter writ- 
ten by Mr. Herbert Radclyffe, and dated January 24, 
1893: “This glorious man in the performance of his duty 
extended an influence upon the souls of men and women 
that drew them up to the higher standards of life where 
he dwelt. I have seen him exert this marvelous influence 
on many occasions, but the one I shall always remember 
was where, as bishop of the diocese, he was administering 
the holy rite of confirmation in one of the mission churches 
of this city (Boston). * * * It was a crowd of toilers, men 
and women alike. How earnest the responses; what rev- 
erence, what calm religious zeal pervaded the place as the 
Bishop uttered the Lord’s Prayer and the people joined 
in it! * * * It was there I witnessed a scene that was a 
demonstration of this glorious Christian’s power — the in- 
definable something I have referred to. It was as he stood 
behind the rail administering the rite of confirmation, laying 
his hands upon the head of the suppliant and saying the 
90 


few simple words of confirmation. What was there in his 
manner, his tone, his soul-utterance that caused everyone 
to be held spellbound, following him as he bent down in 
benediction, and as he raised his noble face to heaven to 
plead that the Good Shepherd keep this member of the 
flock in the fold? I have seen the ceremony hundreds of 
times, but never in its completeness before. * * * I was 
not the only one affected. The scene comes to me as viv- 
idly as then — the hushed held-breath absorption of the 
congregation to the Bishop behind the rail, and he, uncon- 
scious as it were of them, but actively doing his Master’s 
work, doing it as I had never seen it done before. * * * 
I asked those in my company as we walked away if they 
had been similarly influenced, * * * and I found the four 
of us were of one mind. It was a never-to-be-forgotten 
scene. I have seen great sights in my life. I have seen all 
England welcoming the young Danish princess to her 
English home; the return of the Guards from the Crimea. 
The great heart of the people throbbed on these occa- 
sions as I have never seen it since. I saw Napoleon and 
Paris welcome his African troops on their return from the 
desert fields of battle; I have seen Grant, Sherman and 
Blaine welcomed; I have witnessed the thrilling effect of 
war standards, with strips of the national colors still cling- 
ing to them, carried in the streets crowded with people; 
I have heard the noble Wendell Phillips electrifying an 
audience in his greatest oration in the Old South; I have 
heard the polished, gracious Devens, the sarcastic Ingalls, 
the irony of Conkling, the polish of Sumner, the home- 
touch of Dickens, the high breeding of Lowell and the 
wit of genial Holmes — but what are these in memory to 
the touch of the divine I witnessed in the little Church 
that Sabbath eve when the spirit of Easter was abroad 
and the typical lily symbolized the season! It was that 
something that this great man possessed which made a 
91 


pathway for him, as it were, in our crowded streets where 
others would be jostled; it turned cold eyes into those 
aglow with love; it changed stern faces of absorbed busi- 
ness men into those of sympathetic Christians; it trans- 
formed the selfish pomposity of the nouveau riche into 
humble concern for humanity; it broke up the ice of arctic 
conventionality with its rays of warm sympathy and love 
for all, and made this man something more than human in 
the eyes of many.’* 

During this great part of the life of Phillips Brooks he 
never forgot his mother. He had grown to look much 
more like her and he often spoke of her and said he wished 
that he might hear again the sound of her voice speaking 
to him. 

The New Year of 1893 began with the wonderful 
Watch Night Service in Trinity Church, and on the follow- 
ing days he was administering his diocese. On Saturday, 
January 1 4, he preached at the consecration of a Church 
in East Boston. A window was open in the roof which 
could not be closed, and the cold winter air blew in on 
the heads of those present. Coming back in the ferry he 
complained of feeling cold. On Sunday he was ill but in- 
sisted upon going to Hyde Park, where he officiated, and 
then he drove in an open sleigh to Dedham. On Monday 
morning a friend who called on him was terribly struck 
with his altered appearance, but he greeted him as if 
nothing were the matter. 

On Tuesday, the seventeenth of January, Bishop Brooks 
confirmed a class at the Church of the Good Shepherd, 
Boston, although his throat troubled him and he still had 
a severe cold. His brother William went home with him 
and stayed till eleven o’clock. He was in a very happy 
mood and made light of his illness. The next day he 
walked out, and in the evening went to a choir rehearsal 
and dinner in Newton, where he made his last address 
92 


with great difficulty. During the night his throat grew much 
worse, and in the morning was considerably swollen. He 
sent for the doctor, who told him that he must keep in bed 
to prevent him from taking more cold and to avoid a chill, 
but that he had only an “ old-fashioned sore throat.’* 

In the morning and evening of Thursday “ William ” 
saw the Bishop. The doctor was there and made the 
same report, but that night the Bishop was very restless, 
so that in the morning, afternoon and evening of Friday 
and the following days Mr. and Mrs. William Brooks and 
their daughter Gertrude saw the Bishop constantly, and 
kept in touch with the physician, who always spoke fav- 
orably and hopefully of the Bishop’s illness. As he objected 
to having a trained nurse, and as the “ Faithful Katie” and 
one of the other servants had been trained by his dear 
mother and knew how the Bishop wanted things done, 
and were entirely capable of preparing what he needed, 
the doctor did not insist upon having a skilled nurse. The 
Bishop’s throat was now more swollen, and he could talk 
but little and only take liquid food. He continued to read 
his letters and papers, and with tremendous difficulty even 
dictated some of his correspondence. 

On Saturday evening the Rev. Leighton Parks called, 
and the ‘‘Faithful Katie” told him that the Bishop had been 
asking for him, so he could go right up to his large bed- 
room directly over the study. The Bishop was propped 
up with pillows in his mother’s bed, which was completely 
covered with books — his closest friends. There were also 
many letters. He was feeling conscience-stricken at his 
broken engagements, especially at not being able to con- 
firm a class the next day. He told Mr. Parks that he 
thought he was going to die because he could not eat 
anything. Then he said: ‘T came near doing a dreadful 
thing the other day. I was in East Boston, and suddenly 
felt as if I must get away from everybody for a little while, 
93 


and I went to the Cunard dock and asked if the steamer 
had sailed. She had been gone about an hour. I believe 
if she had still been there I should have absconded.” 
(Allen, II, p. 938). Which shows how completely used 
up he had been feeling, and that a rest at the time he had 
been guided “to get away from everybody” might have 
prolonged his life several years. 

On Sunday Bishop Brooks did not seem so well, he 
was weaker and slept more. Still his physician saw no 
cause for alarm and told “William” that he looked for a 
good night and hoped to find the Bishop better in the 
morning. Not so felt the “Faithful Katie,” she had not 
been trained by the Bishop’s mother to fail him NOW; 
she knew that something was radically wrong with the 
Bishop’s health by the “ looks of him.” She went to his 
room after his brother had departed to see what she could 
do for him, but he only wanted some lemonade placed 
where he could reach it, and after she had brought it to 
him he told her to go to bed, for she must be tired and he 
really needed nothing more. “Faithful Katie” bade him 
good night, and then sat herself down outside his door to 
keep watch through the night, the last one on earth for 
Phillips Brooks. Presently she heard him walking about 
his room and talking to himself, saying a hundred times: 
“Take me home, I must go home.” Katie was so alarmed 
that she sent a messenger for the Bishop’s brother, who 
came immediately with the doctor and a trained nurse. 
Then a consulting physician came and both doctors exam- 
ined him carefully, but still found nothing dangerous the 
matter with him. 

While the physicians were consulting together the two 
brothers were alone. The Bishop looked up with a 
heavenly smile and held out his hand. Then he seemed 
to hear music, for he waved his hand gently as was his 
custom when hearing music the tune of which he wished 
94 


to catch or when humming to himself an unfamiliar tune. 
He said good night several times at what might have been 
pauses in the heavenly melodies he was hearing, as if he 
felt his spirit poising to take its flight. He kept smiling 
happily, his face brightly illuminated with joy and peace, 
his wonderful eyes seeing into heaven like St. Stephen’s, 
when he “ being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up stead- 
fastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus 
standing on the right hand of God.” Then he fell asleep, 
but his physical frame was resisting the parting of the spirit, 
for his body seemed very uncomfortable. At six he woke 
up and insisted upon getting out of bed, which is a common 
occurence at such a time. The doctors and nurse guided 
him to a large rocking-chair, for he was really unconscious, 
in a few moments his head dropped, he was breathing 
with immense difficulty; they lifted him back into bed, 
he breathed a few moments longer, and then his spirit went 
home to be forever with Christ his Lord. 

When the news of his death spread like wildfire, it 
seemed impossible to believe it, as we felt that such 
a calamity could not happen, that it could not be true. 
We were so stunned by the news that we went around 
asking if it was not some awful mistake, we were so slow 
in believing such a catastrophe could be true, but when 
our hearts and brains recovered their power of utterance 
the English language was not large enough to express 
what we felt who had known Phillips Brooks personally, 
nor could the thousands and thousands whom he had 
reached through his public utterances or through his books, 
do justice to what they thought of him and to what he 
had done for them. English printed newspapers all over 
the world were filled with editorials, letters, special articles 
and “ news,” expressing their love and admiration for him. 
They printed also many of his “ Sayings,” quotations and 
selections from his writings and poems, in fact the news- 
95 


papers were fairly swamped with letters and “news” about 
him, for it seemed as if nothing had ever happened before 
to claim the attention of the whole people like the death 
of Phillips Brooks, 

“The Boston Herald,” Friday morning, January 27, 

1 893, with many illustrations, and also the “Boston Even- 
ing Transcript” of the same date, had elaborate and de- 
tailed accounts of his funeral, with pages and pages of 
other material relating to his life. The following account 
is condensed from the above mentioned “Boston Herald,” 
because it is too good to be lost. 

The funeral was as remarkable as the man himself. All 
Boston mourned his death and turned out to do reverence 
to his memory. Church and Commonwealth were bound 
together in the sympathy of sorrow. Boston was chief 
mourner, but she did not mourn alone. The Church was 
represented by our bishops and high officials. Other reli- 
gious bodies sent their most distinguished representatives. 
The Commonwealth and the municipality of New Eng- 
land, as well as “ the people,” were drawn together in a 
common grief. The funeral, though centred in Trinity 
Church, radiated far beyond those ivy-covered walls. It 
was as broad as the love and influence of the beloved 
preacher himself had brought about by his life and teach- 
ing. It extended beyond Trinity, which was filled to its 
utmost capacity, beyond Copley Square, with its 1 3,000 
grief stricken people, beyond the limits of the Episcopal 
Church he loved so well, to many denominations that 
gathered for simultaneous services. It extended into the 
business streets, where stores were closed out of respect to 
Boston’s greatest citizen, and even that heart of trade, 
the Stock Exchange, ceased to throb during the noon hour. 
The bells upon the churches and public buildings tolled 
in solemn unison, and all who listened were silent partici- 
pants in the last sad rite. 


96 


At quarter to eight the casket bearing the Bishop’s 
body was borne from the Rectory, comer of Clarendon 
and Newbury Streets, to the Church by a guard of the 
Loyal Legion, of which the Bishop had been chaplain. 
In the vestibule the body lay in state till twelve, the hour 
of the funeral service. The casket was hermetically sealed 
because he had died of diphtheria, but a view of the de- 
ceased Bishop was permitted through a heavy glass plate 
which formed the head of the lid. In death, as in life, the 
Bishop’s grand and beautiful face showed all the strength 
and peace and holiness that characterized his life among 
men. His body was robed in his Bishop’s vestments, and 
across the shining white were drawn his arms, the hands 
lightly clasped. The lower portion of the casket was cov- 
ered with silken national colors, over which were strewn 
long palm branches. Overhead and completely hiding the 
ceiling and walls, was a heavy canopy of black, from under 
which shone a shaded incandescent light. Between the 
double files of the Loyal Legion and under the sombre 
drapery the people passed. Each one of us was permit- 
ted to take a full moment’s look at the lifeless countenance, 
till fully 1 5,000 persons had gazed for the last time on 
the beautiful face of Phillips Brooks. 

The services at Trinity Church were the most remark- 
able and impressive which have occured within the mem- 
ory of living man, and can never fade from the memory 
of those whose sad privilege it was to attend them. The 
stately ritual in one of the most beautiful Churches in Amer- 
ica, the white robed procession of the clergy, the immense 
concourse of mourning people, the beautiful anthems and 
solemn hymns, combined to produce a deathless impres- 
sion. The decorations of the Church were simple, yet ex- 
pressive. The chancel was a mass of laurel and evergreen, 
against which shone in white resplendence a magnificent 
cross of Easter lilies. Wreathes of the same royal blossom 
97 


were placed on either hand. The pulpit was swathed in 
black, upon which appeared a large wreath of carnations. 
On the book-rest of the pulpit lay an enomous bunch of 
purple violets. Around the body of the Church was a 
band of black crepe, and here and there were placed 
wreathes of laurel. The effect was impressive without the 
slightest suggestion of gloom. 

At the noon hour the services promptly began. The 
beautiful melody of “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” taking the 
form of an organ voluntary, sounded in tones of exquisite 
softness and harmony. The enormous congregation stood 
up. At the same moment the vestry doors opened and the 
procession appeared, moving with slow and reverent step 
to the vestibule, whence it turned and thence proceeded 
up the central aisle to the chancel. Next was borne the cas- 
ket on the shoulders of eight Harvard students, all broad- 
shouldered young giants, who carried their solemn burden 
with a stately tread. They were followed by the honorary 
pall-bearers, all men of note and personal friends of the 
dead Bishop. It was an indescribable spectacle as it moved 
slowly and solemnly along the broad aisle. When the 
majestic words of the opening sentence in the ritual, “ I 
am the resurrection and the life,” pronounced by Bishop 
Williams, were heard, the hush was intense, nothing but 
the voice of the speaker and the measured footfall of the 
bearers being audible. The casket was reverently placed at 
the altar steps. Again the solemn notes of the great organ 
pealed and the choir chanted the Psalm, “ Lord, let me 
know mine end/* which is a part of the burial service. 
The old quartet of Trinity which has so often filled the 
Church with its music, sung it with exquisite tenderness and 
pathos. The effect upon the congregation was indescrib- 
able. From all over the Church arose the sound of weep- 
ing. Women cried undisguisedly, and men of all ranks and 
conditions of life, clergy and laity, sobbed aloud. Many 
98 


who had bravely repressed their emotion until now were 
unable to restrain themselves longer. It was a universal 
Miserere, and nothing could have proved so strongly the 
hold which Bishop Brooks held in the love and affections 
of the thousands who knew him. Bishop Potter then read 
the lesson from I. Corinthians 1 5. Dr. Donald announced 
the hymn, 44 Jesus, Lover of My Soul,’* which was sung 
feelingly by the choir in the West Gallery and by the 
congregation. Then the Creed was said reverently by all 
present, and after the prayers, as the congregation was 
singing the hymn, 44 For all saints who from their labor 
rest,” the pall-bearers again took the cloth covered casket 
upon their shoulders and marched out of Church with the 
funeral party. The congregation in the Church remained 
standing while the outdoor service was being held. The 
casket was placed upon a bier on the front steps, Dr. 
Donald, and his assistants in surpliced robes, turned and 
looked out over that great sea of faces and began his read- 
ing from Revelation : 44 Blessed are the dead that die in 
the Lord.” Then followed the prayer which was a paean 
of thanksgiving for the noble, inspiring, uplifting life of the 
dead man and preacher, for the lesson he had taught and 
the good he had done, for his inspiring and reassuring 
voice, which had brought thousands over to deeper com- 
munion with the Creator, and a fuller realization of the 
Fatherhood of God, and the Brotherhood of man. The 
Lord’s Prayer was then repeated by the whole of the 
great congregation, and the hymn, 44 O God our help in 
ages past,” copies of which had been distributed through 
the crowd, was sung by 20,000 voices to the accompan- 
iment of cornets. The people were then dismissed with 
the benediction. 

The body was taken to Mt. Auburn. Hundreds of 
persons lined the streets through which the funeral cortege 
passed, the few stores along the line of march were closed. 
99 


At Harvard 2000 students assembled on the campus, 
while the bells began to toll as the Bishop passed those 
gates for the last time. Ten deep, with uncovered heads, 
stood the Harvard boys as the melancholy procession filed 
slowly through their ranks from the college yard and out by 
the old gate it passed, and then in silence and filled with sor- 
row, the great crowd of youths dispersed ; for once the exu- 
berant spirits were stilled, and the ready jest and rollicking 
manner gave place to signs of genuine heart-felt grief for 
the loss of a friend, perhaps the greatest son Harvard had 
ever given to the world. 

Then slowly to his last resting place, and Phillips Brooks* 
body was laid near his beloved mother’s earthly remains, 
the mother whose earnest prayers had been so richly 
answered when her six sons gave themselves to Christ and 
His service. The voice of the minister broke the stillness 
of the mourners as the sun sank behind the clouds of night. 
Then the assembly melted away, leaving all that was mor- 
tal of Phillips Brooks in that lonely, narrow, hillside grave. 

“We ask ourselves, How shall a life like that be won? 
And again we must answer as we answered before. By 
personal allegiance. No other power is large enough and 
flexible enough at once to make it. Loving obedience, 
loving obedience is the only atmosphere in which the 
vision of the general purpose and the faithfulness in special 
work grow in their true proportion and relation to each 
other. The distant hills with the glory on their summits and 
the close meadow where the grass waits for the scythe 
— they meet completely in the broad kingdom of a loved 
and obeyed Lord. And who is Lord but Christ! And 
where but in the soul of him who finds in Christ the 
worthy revealer of the life’s purpose and the sufficient 
master of every deed shall the great ideals of life and the 
petty details come harmoniously together! Obey Him, 
love Him, and nothing is too great, nothing is too little, for 
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love knows no struggle of great and little. No impulse is 
too splendid for the simplest task, no task is too simple 
for the most splendid impulse.** (“Light of the World, 
and Other Sermons,’* pp. 1 1 9, 1 20). 

“ Obedience is the only key that can unlock the trea- 
sures of nature or of man. Obedience has an absolute 
power. To the obedient man nothing can refuse its rich- 
ness. Nature flies open and takes man into her inmost 
heart. Government opens her arms and surrounds him 
with her most secure protection. The best men make their 
goodness as much His as theirs. But if obedience is not 
there, nothing can take its place ; no mere excitement of 
the taste, no rapturous affection can cover over and change 
the fact of wilfulness. * * * If you would be strong you 
must learn to obey. Self-will is weakness; but to find the 
nature and will of everything that is higher than you 
are, and bend yourself to it with complete docility, that 
makes the richest treasure it possesses, yours. O learn to 
obey, learn to obey. Obedience is the only mastery and 
strength.’’ (“Twenty Sermons,’’ pp. 305, 306). 

“A living Christ, dear friends. * * * Do you believe 
it? What are you dreary for, O mourner ? What are you 
hesitating for, O worker ? What are you fearing death for, 
O man ? Oh, if we could only lift up our heads and live 
with Him new lives, high lives, lives of hope and love and 
holiness, to which death should be nothing but the break- 
ing away of the last cloud, and the letting of the life out 
to its completion,” (“Sermons,” p. 227). 


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